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Poor principal leadership has been highlighted as a reason why most property managers don’t feel they get enough love from sales agents.
A recent Residential Property Manager poll uncovered that 75 per cent of property managers feel sales agents do not treat them with enough respect.
National property management trainer and consultant Darren Hunter told Residential Property Manager the attitude of sales agents is reflective of the business owner’s values.
“If the actual principal believes that sales is the big cash cow and PM only serves as a secondary, lesser-of-importance role in the business, then that is mirrored onto the sales team,” he said.
“I have even seen extreme situations where sales have such a strong hold over PMs, because they have referred their clients to the business, that they dictate what their fees will be and won’t be.”
Mr Hunter said the worst situation he has seen is where a principal has encouraged sales to refer property management business elsewhere.
“My throwaway line is a lot of these sales people just simply believe that property managers bring stress and the ferals into the office,” he said.
Coral Sea Property Management principal Shaun Podbury told Residential Property Manager that mutual ignorance can be another reason why property management and sales may clash.
“Sales staff have no idea what property managers do, and property managers have no idea what sales staff do,” he said.
“So the PMs sit there and go, ‘You glamour boys with your beautiful cars and your shirts', and they don’t know that most of those sales agents are working 90 hours a week to get what they do.”
This is again replicated, he said, when sales agents downplay property management because they have no idea how hard-working and passionate PMs are.
“So they both look at each other and there is this distrust that develops, because no one has bothered to educate either party in what it is each area does,” he said.
“It is easy to shift blame, but at the end of the day, that has to rest with the leadership.”
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