WeconnectU News

The rental property industry is not a new one. People have been renting homes and business premises for literal centuries. As a result, most people are very familiar with the rental process. Unfortunately for rental managers, this means their services are frequently underestimated, underappreciated, and (very often) underpaid. A big part of the problem is that there are countless agencies out there offering the same rental management services: placing tenants, managing tenancies, and handling basic financials. As essential as these are to a successful rental investment, they’re not service differentiators and they don’t help anyone stand out of the crowd. So, what can rental asset managers do to make customers sit up and take notice of the considerable value they add? The key lies in focussing on customer experience.

While community management has flourished in recent years, one serious challenge has continued to plague the industry: narrow profit margins. Complexity has skyrocketed, driving effort levels up exponentially – and yet costs per unit have consistently lagged well behind this effort curve. As a result, more and more community managers are struggling to deliver the service quality their clients expect without completely eroding their entire profit margins.

South Africa’s community management industry is highly competitive. Achieving consistent growth and success requires a razor-sharp competitive edge. Of course, finding and honing that edge isn’t always easy. It takes a deep understanding of your operations’ strengths and weaknesses – and tools and processes primed for agility – to successfully evolve your business for optimal performance.

At WeconnectU, 2024 started off just the way we like it – with a bang! We officially onboarded our 500th client to our Rental Asset Management Solution, and our 900th client to RedRabbit – our fully integrated Inspections and Maintenance solution. These successes followed closely on the back of some incredible international recognition in 2023, which included our win in the Best Property Management Software (South Africa) category of the highly respected – and extremely competitive – Technology Innovator Awards

If you’ve been following our journey for a while now, you’ll know that WeconnectU’s entire reason for existence is solving the four main challenges of property management: compliance, manageability, scalability and profitability. As we head into a new year, most property managers (i.e. Community Managers of HOAs and Bodies Corporate, and Asset Managers managing investors’ rental portfolios), will be turning their attention to profitability. After all, there’s nothing that gets the excitement levels rising quite like the thought of a bumper financial year.

Today’s business landscape is characterised by unprecedented levels of customer influence. Between online reviews, social media, community groups and word of mouth, businesses can literally live or die based on the opinions of their customers. As a result, more and more organisations – particularly in customer-facing industries like property management – are expanding their previously product/service-centric business models to include a far greater emphasis on customer experience.

In 2022, we conducted a survey among our clients to identify the most challenging aspects of property management. The results showed that compliance was one of their biggest headaches at the time – a particularly frustrating situation, since compliance’s labour-intensive (and hard-to-manage) activities contribute nothing towards running a profitable business.

Growth and scaling are often used interchangeably, but there are some very important differences between the two. Business growth refers to the process of increasing a business’ size, revenue and (typically) market share. Its focus is on attracting more customers, expanding into new markets and increasing sales as a path to greater profitability. The trouble is that growth (without the right foundations) tends to bring a corresponding increase in business costs, which can quickly erode any increase in profits. Scaling, on the other hand, is all about optimising operations to handle increased demand without requiring a significant increase in resources. This is achieved by improving infrastructure and operational efficiencies (often through automation) to deliver more output “bang” for the same input “buck”.

This is the third instalment of our Community Meetings article series. Our first article, Tapping the full potential of Community Meetings, covered the many challenges (and enormous workload) Community Managers face when planning, facilitating and concluding meetings. Our second article, How (and why) to create the ultimate community meeting experience, unpacked the importance of community meetings as critical touchpoints for Community Managers to drive community participation and progress. Today, we’ll be taking a more practical angle, examining real-world actions Community Managers can take to unlock the full spectrum of Community Meeting efficiencies and benefits.

If you’ve been following our journey for a while now, you’ll know that WeconnectU is the only company in South Africa (and, as far as we can tell, the world) to provide custom-built solutions for all three facets of property management (Community Management, Rental Asset Management and Inspections and Maintenance Management). Being in this unique position, and collaborating with almost 1500 clients across our three solutions, is an achievement that fills us with pride on a daily basis. However, that pride has recently received a very humbling boost in the form of recognition from two highly respected international organisations.