WeconnectU News

In our recent article, Tapping the Full Potential of Community Meetings, we explored the many challenges – and enormous workload – Community Managers face in planning, facilitating, and concluding community meetings. Today, we’ll be examining the other side of the coin: community meetings’ importance as a touchpoint for Community Managers to engage their communities and drive progress on critical, high-impact matters. The reality is, despite their many challenges, community meetings offer an unrivalled opportunity for Community Managers to demonstrate – and leverage – their professional skills for the benefit of their communities. From guiding strategic decision-making, to accelerating budget approvals, to facilitating trustee selections – the value-adding potential is endless.

Compliance is one of those frustrating areas in property management that feels like it delivers very little tangible benefit for all the time-consuming and repetitive input it requires. It’s not easy, it’s not enjoyable, and it doesn’t exactly bring in the bacon. And yet, in reality, compliance isn’t only benefitting investors – it’s actively benefiting the property management industry, too.

As a modern rental portfolio manager, you’re undoubtedly well aware of the importance of maximising yield and return on investment (ROI) for your investors. With this goal front and centre, it can be tempting (for property managers and investors, alike) to focus solely on rental income and occupancy rates, putting routine maintenance and property upgrades on the backburner. In reality, however, these seemingly less-important tasks can have a surprisingly large impact on a rental property’s short-term profits and long-term value. In this article, we’ll explore some of the biggest benefits of prioritising routine maintenance and upgrades, helping you motivate your investors to make informed choices that yield lasting rewards.

In business, as in life, the only constant is change. For today’s Rental Portfolio Managers, however, that change is happening a little faster than usual. The industry is widely acknowledged as having entered an important, transformative phase driven by technological advancements, changing expectations, evolving regulations, and a growing emphasis on customer service and profitability.

In the upcoming months, we’ll be running a series of articles delving more deeply into these two Community Meeting Management optimisation themes. Stay tuned for more valuable insights and practical strategies that empower Community managers to derive the ultimate value from their community meetings.

Take a moment to think through the handling of a simple maintenance request, from reporting all the way through to payment. For most property managers, the process (outlined in our diagram below) includes around 8 steps and a bare minimum of 22 separate communications. (Double or triple that for more complex issues.)

At WeconnectU, we are on a mission to create more valued and valuable property managers, and one of the ways we are doing so is by helping to reposition them as Rental Asset Managers, rather than Rental Administrators. This may, at first glance, seem like superficial semantics, but closer inspection quickly reveals the potential of this seemingly small change.

In a recent article, we explored the concept of value as a Community Manager, and why connecting the dots between effort, value and compensation is so critical for property management businesses. Our research shows that Community Managers with a solid grasp on the amount of effort going into each community, and a clear picture of how that effort translates into tangible value for their clients, are far more likely to receive fair compensation for their services. Unfortunately, as we all know, there is a limit to how much effort any Community Manager can put in. There are only 24 hours in a day, after all. That means the value you deliver (and therefore compensation you can reasonably expect) is limited by the amount of effort it requires.

One of the biggest challenges affecting the property industry today is a phenomenon we call The Iceberg Effect. This neatly illustrates the difference between what your clients think you do as a Community Manager and what you really do to help your communities achieve their full potential.

There’s no denying that technology has been a gamechanger for property professionals, but becoming more active in the digital landscape is not without its risks. South Africa has been ranked 6th in the list of countries most affected by cybercrime, according to cybersecurity company Surfshark. Thankfully, there’s plenty that you, as a property practitioner, can do to protect yourself, your clients and your business from becoming yet another cybercrime statistic.