Property Managers Struggle to Find Quality Talent

Property managers are struggling to find and retain top talent, according to a recent property management survey from AppFolio. Talent is essential to growth and expansion of a company, and an inability to find talent could inhibit growth. In the survey, 13% of property managers named recruiting top talent as the biggest challenge and 45.3% of property managers named talent as the biggest factor inhibiting growth.

“Making the right hires, even retaining the good ones, are very important to any property management company—and, as the survey suggests, not doing so can hurt continued growth and expansion,” Nat Kunes, senior product line manager at AppFolio, tells GlobeSt.com. “Good things to look for in property management talent are things like problem-solving skills, ability to keep cool under pressure, a teamwork mentality, self-starters, and, of course, highly organized individuals.”

Hiring talent is important, but retaining talent is integral to company growth. “While hiring top talent is important, actually getting candidates in the door and retaining them is even more important, especially as the property manager workforce becomes older—50 is the average age of a property manager,” adds Kunes. “Luckily, technology can work in your favor, here, and should be referenced during the interview process to show candidates that you care about them having an excellent employee experience. Millennials and Gen Z workers crave flexibility in the workplace—something that, in past, has been hard to achieve in property management.”

While finding top talent is a problem in many industries, Kunes said that property managers can create efficiencies that support growth by leveraging technology. “Tech advancements give property managers the ability to work remotely via mobile, if needed,” he explains. “They’re connected to their work at all times so that, should they need to be on-site in a unit to do an inspection or check out a maintenance issue, other work or urgent matters don’t need to take a back seat until they get back into the office, and they can complete their work more quickly.”

In addition to mobile apps that makes some parts of property management easier, automation can also help to easy the day-to-day burdens of property mangers. “Automation has created a much nicer working environment for property management professionals, where they don’t have to spend as much of their time on mundane and tedious tasks like collections, marketing, etc.,” says Kunes. “They can use the time they get back to focus on more important items for their business and to strike a better work-life balance, something this is very appealing to job candidates.”