TRP094 – Becoming an Operations Assassin (Part 2)
July 7, 2020
Transcription
If you’re looking for honest, real world, no BS advice on how to create income, build wealth and achieve true freedom with real estate, you’re in the right place. Welcome to another episode of the real estate preacher podcast, Joe, where your host, Randy Lawrence shares with you, his experiences and strategies from over decades as a successful real estate investor. This episode is sponsored by prosperity capital partners. Learn more at prosperitycapitalpartners.net. Now onto the show.
I want to welcome you to today’s show- exciting stuff today. I know many people probably are not going to be excited about this, but we’re continuing on in our series of becoming an operations assassin. And we’re going to talk today about marketing. And so with each of these segments, we’re going to break down a different area or aspect of the business. And you know, we’re going to specifically talk about this as it relates to the real estate side of things. But again, whether you are a doctor attorney own an engineering firm, whatever it is, there is a clickable merit in principles that adhere to this that you can transfer over to your business as well. So praise the Lord. Let’s dive in today. We’re talking about marketing and again, we talked about in the operations thing, really you have to inspect what you expect.
And again, by that definition, you need to have set clearly what the goal is, what the outcome is, so that your team or your people can have a clear expectation about what they are supposed to be able to do or to achieve. Right? And so now for us in a marketing arena, we have a targeted ability to get to a certain occupancy, right? So like if we’re dealing with an apartment complex and the area let’s say is running at a 92 to 95%, our goal then is we need to be above what the area is doing, right. So we need to be at 95 96. And so if we’re below that, then the question becomes why, and then do we have enough qualified traffic? And then are we doing the marketing necessary to generate that traffic? And I was just talking with another team member one yesterday, and then again here today, and you’d got to explore every possible Avenue, right?
I mean, so what are you doing to be able to bring that up? Right? And so now for us, that becomes all right, we are working with apartments.com. One of our vendors is also at folio where they have a premier positioning, where they push out the rental opportunities to different websites. We push to rent lingo. We have what’s going on with how many drive-bys did we have, how much traffic is coming from our property website, how much traffic is coming from Zumper how much traffic is coming from internet searches, how much traffic is coming from Facebook, how much traffic is coming from Craigslist. So these are a multitude of sources that we have that we are tracking on a weekly basis. And so then on a daily basis, we’re looking at, okay, how many ads are being published to Craigslist? How many ads are being published to Facebook? How many ads are being published to the apartments.com are we then in turn, pushing out content with the ads on a daily basis to the other websites? So these are all metrics that
Our requirements now, not only that, but then now you think about
What are some additional ways we could do it. Are there areas succinct to the property in the immediate vicinity that have a congregation of people that come to it? Right? So in that we can post flyers, we can post information that becomes the manager’s responsibility, and then are they doing it on a weekly basis? We also have in place a employment preferred program or a preferred employer program, right? And so we identify the top 10 employers in the immediate sub market, and we develop a special offering for those employers. And we go to them and say, Hey, we want to introduce ourselves. We want to develop a relationship with you. We want to provide a benefit in a value to your people that work here so they could work or excuse me, live closer to work. And, and we want to provide them, here’s the value proposition we have.
And then also once we’ve implemented that plan, now it becomes a required element for the manager to visit those people on a, on a weekly basis. Now, not all 10, again, you do round Robin, right? So if you’ve got 10 people, that’s, you know, two a week, every five weeks, right? So basically it’s almost like once a month, here’s Mary showing up, maybe with donuts or whatever, and a refresh, the flyer and dah, dah, dah, dah. And then over time you can begin to identify which relationships are the best, which are the most fruitful and then where you can concentrate to deliver additional and most value. Also then too, once we are at a place in the property where it is, you know, significantly enough transition and the caliber and quality of tenants is who we want to replicate. Then we also implement a referral program, right?
With residents who then are benefited by referring in other residents is, and they can get, you know, a gift card or they can be entered into a drawing to, you know, when a television set, if we’re doing a big push, you know, so there’s any number of different types of referral programs. And we vary the programs based on the demographic of the market and the location of the property. But again, here’s the thing, I would say that with all of that, that is super critical, right? Is that at the very minimum, we have a weekly report that tracks that information. So this is where people in leadership get off track is you tell somebody to do something or you lay out, here’s what I want you to do. And then you don’t go back in inspect it. Right. You don’t inspect the results. Yeah. I just had a difficult conversation right before this recording with a team member because of the accountability factor.
Right? So I’m saying, okay, what about this? What about this? What about this? They didn’t have the sufficient answer. So we had a discussion about what that means to get the answers, and then more importantly, to be able to communicate those answers. Right? And so this is where, again, for us in our team members every week, there’s a weekly report that contains that information, right? So that every week the manager has to communicate, where are they at with respect to occupancy? Where are they at with respect to the completion of units that are being renovated? Where are they at with respect to results from the different traffic sources? What is the closing ratio of those traffic sources? And then now we can identify, are we getting qualified traffic from this area or unqualified traffic? So if we have unqualified traffic, you’re not going to be able to convert that.
Right. And so, and again, that’s where you have to in the marketing arena, know who your prospective client is and begin to really target that person. And so that’s what we’ve done. And you know, the secret sauce here, here, here, it is boil it down to, this is yes. You’ve got to think through number one, who your person is and where you can get in front of them or connect together with them too. You have to have a consistent process for delivering that message to be in front of them. And then three, you have to have in evaluative process, right? You have to be able to evaluate the results so that you can course correct. Right? At the end of the day, you have to get the result. Like I was having a conversation with somebody yesterday about this, and I told him, I said, man, what the hell?
I said, if I was doing this, I would already have the result. And I wasn’t saying that, or, you know, communicating that to be, you know, high Brown or anything. It was just simply true because at the end of the day, I’m not going to stop short of getting the result, whatever it takes to get the result, that’s what we have to do. And so when you’re talking about, you know, marketing, you’ve got to figure that out. You’ve got to have ample qualified prospects, traffic, whatever it is. And again, this applies to anything, right? So again, if you’re not doing that, then you’re doing a disservice to your business and you’re going to struggle financially. You’ve got to get the people in front of you. And so for us on the apartment complex side, that’s critical, right? And so we have this across the board, every manager, every regional manager, all asset managers in internal, people are aware of this and it is a requirement and there’s accountability to it.
Right. And so we’re even now tightening up that process even further for the asset managers to then if they’re not hitting the Mark on this thing, what is the steps that are being taken to improve it? I just had that conversation with another person. It’s like, where are you at right now? Red, yellow, or green, partially in the yellow. Okay. What’s the reason. Okay. The reason is a lack of material supplies because of the pandemic. I, okay. I get that. Well, you figure out in communicate to me in our next meeting, how you’re going to move this from yellow to green. Right. Period. That’s it. I mean, you know, and so they’re gonna get that figured out and present. Here’s what we’ve done to move the needle from yellow, back to green. And again, that’s the thing like, look, let’s take that as an example, right?
That’s a situation and we’ll dive into this in construction, but it all, it’s all interplays to the accountability piece. So there are materials that are not available for construction right now because of the pandemic. Right. There’s a lack of manufacturing that took place in almost over the globe for two months. And then now there’s a surgeon, you know, construction and all this other stuff. And so supplies have been eaten up. So there are certain elements of wood that’s needed for, you know, construction work that was not available. And it’s like, okay, well they can figure that out. Right. Call every home Depot, every Lowe’s every, you know, wood supply place in a 50 mile radius, 50 mile radius, what the hell are you talking about? Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. Right. Right. Because again, if we have to wait two weeks to get the wood in, is it cheaper to wait two weeks?
Or is it cheaper to drive with a trailer, 50 miles to a supply place, pick up the wood and get the job moving forward, which one’s a better financial outcome for us. Clearly it’s cheaper to pay for the gas and the time to drive the 50 miles than it is to wait two weeks. Right. And so that’s part of having to, you know, one hold accountability, but two in coal, CADing a culture of people’s mindset to be like, whatever it takes to get it done, that’s what we’re going to do. So praise the Lord. So again I hope and pray that it is that you find value in this series. I am not one who, you know, there’s some people that live in breathe operations, they just love it. It’s like, that’s what they live for. You know, for me, that’s not the case.
I’m highly skilled and highly capable in it, but it’s like, it’s a part of what’s necessary. My greater like enjoyment, I guess you could say is looking at the vision overall, putting the pieces together, moving the advancement forward of the organization. But I recognized in order to achieve that, it requires the operations to be tight. And so we dive into those things that need to be dove into. And that’s where I would say you have to do the same. I’m grateful and glad that you’re a part of this. I want to ask you to share the real estate preacher with other folks you know, go on to iTunes, give us a, a five star review, Lord willing and, or even Stitcher or Google as well so that other people can hear about it. And then also to would ask you to share this on your own social media invite other people to listen.
We want to be a blessing to the multitude. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to another episode of the real estate preacher podcast. I hope today that you learned something that you can immediately apply in your life or business. Make sure that you check us out on iTunes or at therealestatepreacher.com for more information, if you want to find out more about partnering together with me personally, on real estate deals, including apartment complexes, go to therealestatepreacher.com and click on the invest with Randy link. I look forward to talking with you personally, have a blessed and victorious week four. This is the week God has ordained for you.
