How to Get Property Management Clients (Lead Gen Methods)

With such a competitive and fast-paced real estate market, especially rental markets, knowing how to get property management clients is crucial for starting and growing a property management business.

Generating leads and landing clients can seem like a mystery, especially when starting out. But if you work hard, research your market, and plan intelligent strategies, you’ll be flush with new clients before you know it.

In this guide, we’ll review some of the best strategies for generating property management leads and developing your business.

Reach Potential Clients on Social Media

It’s a new world out there, and social media has become one of the most effective ways to find and convert property management clients. Lead generation is all about finding customers where they are, and these days, you’ll find them on social media.

Social media advertising is all about creating engaging content and building around the strategies that tend to work best for the platforms you’re utilizing. For example, Instagram works best with beautiful visuals, whether photos or videos. Once you’ve captured some flashy visuals, use relevant hashtags so people can find you. With follows in tow, interacting with them can help outline why you’re the best property management company for their properties.

Alternatively, LinkedIn works better with text-based content and case studies, where you can explore thought leadership ideas related to your expertise.

Once you identify the best platform for you and find some strategies that resonate with potential clients, double down on them and iterate on specifics to fine-tune your approach and connect with more property owners. Further, success on one platform can open doors to success on others. If you find a client on LinkedIn with a beautiful property, you could take photos of it and share them on Instagram.

Encourage Referrals from Existing Customers

One of the best ways to land new property management leads is to mine the resources you’ve already worked so hard to foster — existing and past clients.

Suppose you use property management software (and you really should). In that case, you can quickly sort through your existing customers, finding clients you think most likely know other property owners who need your experience and expertise. People are far more likely to work with those they trust and have vouched for, so let others do some of the heavy lifting for you.

You might even consider offering incentives for referral business. A gift card for client conversions or a discount on rent or services can go a long way in encouraging your customers to research their contacts.

Dial in Your Email Marketing

Cultivating a solid email list is one of the most important elements of modern marketing techniques. Email lists allow property managers to sort potential customers into categories, which opens up possibilities for targeted and highly specific messaging.

A curated email list allows you to send valuable content like market insights, property management tips, or local real estate trends updates. This content should include a clear “call to action,” or CTA, that invites the client to connect with you, with an easy path to do so.

If you don’t have an email list, start building one immediately. Perhaps you can get emails through your social media accounts by offering incentives. Email marketing is a critical channel because few other ideas on this list offer the kind of direct messaging at scale that email marketing offers.

Learn Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

One of the most important aspects of online digital marketing is SEO. SEO is the practice of optimizing a website to appear as highly as possible on search engines like Google.

When someone enters “property managers in (your city)” into Google search, you want your website on top of the results. It’s more likely to happen if you’ve properly optimized the content on your site. The fact that you’re even here reading this article is likely because you found it in Google search results. After all, we’ve optimized it for SEO purposes.

The best part of a well-optimized site is that it’s essentially free, organic traffic from Google searches by interested clients.

Utilize Paid Advertising

Paid advertising is another avenue to attract the highest-quality property management leads. With more pinpoint control than organic SEO techniques, paid advertising allows you to get in front of the right people for a price.

Whether paid ads on social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram, Google Ads, or even an ad in a local newspaper, you can tailor a paid ad with client-specific messaging.

The most significant consideration with paid advertising is making sure the ads you’re paying for make sense for your budget and will deliver a net profit. There’s no sense in overspending for ads if the clients you convert don’t bring a high enough return.

Start a YouTube Channel

Starting a YouTube channel is an excellent way to connect with potential clients by creating helpful and unique video content. Video content is one of the most common ways to consume information on the internet and is easily shareable across multiple platforms, like Facebook and your own personal website.

TurboTenant uses YouTube to connect with a wide variety of potential clients, offering helpful property management tips from experts, meaningful information about rules and regulations, and tutorials on how to use our software. As an industry leader, we can start a conversation with our customers through informative video content, and our YouTube channel has become a powerful lead-generation tool.

As a subject matter expert, you can leverage your expertise by creating engaging videos demonstrating why you’re the right person for a client’s property management needs.

Start a Podcast

Launching a podcast helps you reach clients who might prefer audio content because they’re always on the more. Podcasts are easy to access with mobile phones or computers, and people often listen to them while in their cars, working out, or in the office.

Like a YouTube channel, a podcast is a great way to showcase your expertise, showing people why you’re the right person to manage their properties without saying so directly. Focusing episodes around your services subtly with CTAs to your website can quickly lead to higher lead conversions when you’ve found your audience.

You can incorporate guests or co-hosts and even film the podcast to syndicate on YouTube, which doubles your content without doubling your work.

Attend Networking Events

We’ve focused a lot on relatively newer, more digitally oriented marketing techniques so far, but there’s still value in some tried-and-true methods. In-person networking is a great way to meet your clients face-to-face and hear their needs.

It allows you to build rapport and establish trust with potential leads when you make an excellent first impression, and these interactions can build long-lasting relationships and investments.

In-person networking can often be more effective than digital marketing, even though it can seem like a bigger time investment. Finding suitable events through platforms like LinkedIn, Meetup, and even Facebook can result in genuine connections among potential clients, especially if you have plenty of business cards to go around.

Cold Call & Cold Email Potential Leads

If other methods aren’t bringing you the leads you want, sometimes a more direct approach is the way to go. Directly cold-calling or cold-emailing potential leads to let them know about your business and services can be a bold and effective way to gain new clients.

Once you’ve done the research and built your lead list, construct a short and to-the-point pitch. This will incentivize people to connect with you while summarizing your skills and business. Cold calls aim to pique a lead’s interest to secure a follow-up conversation, not necessarily to close the deal on the first interaction.

Send Direct Mail

One classic method of reaching potential property management leads is direct mail. While it’s more costly than email, physical mail can often leave a strong impression on clients, allowing the design and content to outline your business and services clearly.

When creating a direct mail campaign, you should focus on engaging visuals, clear messaging, and easy-to-find contact information so people can easily reach out to you. Include a strong CTA with a phone number, website, or even a QR code to provide various methods for clients to reach you.

The more research you do and the better your lead list, the higher your conversion rate will be. Highly targeted direct mail campaigns, which have been a mainstay in real estate advertising for years, can see conversion rates as high as 10-20%.

Next Step: Streamline Your Property Management Operation

Now that you understand how to get property management clients, it’s time to ensure your business can handle the new influx of clients. Finding the right property management software for long-term and day-to-day operations is the best way to streamline your workflow and make it as efficient as possible.

Software, like TurboTenant, can simplify daily tasks to scale the business to new heights with features like:

• Online rent collection
• State-specific lease agreements for all 50 states
• Tenant and lease management
• Financial reporting and accounting tools
• Comprehensive tenant screening and background checks
• Syndicated rental property advertising across dozens of top listing sites

Investing in the right property management software increases your productivity, leaving you more time to find new clients. It also simplifies your workflow, keeping your tenants and owners as happy as possible.