.png)
Unlike the traditional multifamily rental property management setup, with its heavy reliance on on-site personnel based out of the communities they manage, the single family rental property management model is well suited to centralized operations due to the spread out nature of many portfolios. But don’t let that trick you into thinking that centralizing the property management operations for your single family rental portfolio is going to be easy. As is the case with overarching procedural shifts for any business, there’s going to be a lot of change management best practices you’re going to have to put into place to help staff and residents alike get comfortable with a new way of operating.
With that in mind, we asked some of our largest single family rental customers to provide their insights into how to overcome the obstacles associated with centralization. Here are ten key steps they recommend taking in preparation for increased centralization to set your organization up for success.
Create a roadmap and timeline for your centralization efforts
Building a comprehensive roadmap for your centralization efforts, including start and end dates for different stages of the process, is key to ensuring everyone involved in the project is able to stay on track and on the same page. It helps keep teams accountable and ensures they’re able to operate on manageable timelines. Plus, building an easy to follow roadmap broken down by phases also enables you to undergo the change gradually and in measured steps, making it easier to draw actionable conclusions from the process.
One EliseAI customer had a great deal of success centralizing their operations by breaking down the process into five phases spread over the course of a year. They started with operations, moved to leasing, then onto lease administration, before moving onto resident services and finishing with facilities. Rather than try and centralize all five of these functions at once, they made changes that allowed them to measure the impact of each centralization push and wrapped their learnings back into the next phase of the project.
Get buy-in from key stakeholders and (for third party managers) ownership group
You can be dead set on revamping the existing structure of your property management operations to a more centralized model, but if your key stakeholders don’t believe in the project and your ownership groups are opposed to centralizing you’re going to have a very difficult time making any substantive changes to your operations. If your organization is a third party manager trying to get buy-in from ownership groups, consider the openness of each owner to technological advancement and the perceived importance they place on the role of on-site team members when you’re trying to articulate the value of the program to them. We’ll dive deeper into choosing pilot communities for centralization later in this article, but if you know a certain ownership group might be more receptive to adopting new solutions to help reduce costs they might be a good candidate to have their operations centralized first. Subsequently, you can showcase the results of a successful pilot to help convince other owners about the value of adopting a centralized model.
Define the scope of work for different teams involved in centralization
One of the key benefits of centralization is that teams can focus on the specialized tasks that they’re best suited to handling as opposed to more general responsibilities. In order to ensure each team has a clear picture of what they’re in charge of handling, it’s pivotal to document clearly which role—onsite or centralized— is in charge of what during the centralization process. While onsite teams may have had overlap in roles and responsibilities while working on site, making sure each team has clear marching orders and defined goals during the centralization process will make it easier for you to assess what part is and isn’t working effectively for your organization.
Build a centralization committee to keep the project on track
As centralization requires collaboration between multiple teams spread across a variety of locations, it’s crucial to establish a dedicated committee tasked with ensuring continued alignment during the process. Appoint committee members from all the teams involved in the centralization process to ensure that every function has a voice and is able to surface any operational issues or inefficiencies as a result of the changes. This group should meet regularly to discuss what’s going well, what isn’t, how the centralization process can be improved, and to ensure that deadlines and project stages are being met. This also presents an opportunity to review other processes or tasks that might be due for an overhaul but haven’t been addressed because they’ve “always been done that way.” Having a dedicated team focused on process improvement gives you an opportunity to challenge the status quo and reexamine tasks your team has traditionally taken for granted.
Define uniform talking points to be shared with department leaders
Whenever an organization undergoes a large procedural change it’s only natural that team members will have a ton of questions about the what and the why behind the process. For one, some employees might be worried about what it might mean for the future of their roles. With this in mind, it’s pivotal that you ensure consistent messaging about centralization on a department by department basis. If one department leader goes around saying the centralization effort is predominantly driven by the desire to cut costs and another department leader chooses to say resolving operational inefficiencies is the primary reason for the change, you’re going to end up with a lot of confused team members. With that in mind, make sure you develop a uniform set of talking points that can be given to all department leaders. Otherwise, you run the risk of teams falling out of alignment due to different perceptions of the process changes.
Acknowledge and address the changes to come
As long as we’re on the subject of talking points, it’s important to be transparent and honest about the growing pains that your organization might undergo as you centralize your property management operations. There is the very real possibility that wholesale changes to roles and responsibilities throughout the organization might result in redundancies that force leadership to trim headcount or reallocate resources. Be upfront and proactive when communicating the changes to come in order to keep your employees from worrying about what it means for their future with the organization. If you’re not transparent, rumors about the future may start bubbling up, which could result in high-performers leaving for other companies, lower employee satisfaction and productivity, and increased stress. It’s key that you face any uncomfortable questions head on to build confidence in leadership and the centralization effort.
Define centralization project prioritizations relative to other org initiatives
In a perfect world, centralization could be your organization's one and only key strategic priority. But realistically, there’s going to be a wide variety of initiatives and projects going on across the organization, particularly if your property management company is on the larger side. With that in mind, it’s important to define where centralization fits in the hierarchy of organizational initiatives you’re pursuing. Doing so ensures that your team can stay aligned on their responsibilities and objectives even in situations where they’re being pulled in multiple directions or forced to make decisions about prioritization. Knowing what goals take precedence at any given point keeps everyone on the same page and reduces the risk of confusion.
Create new centralized job descriptions
The roles and responsibilities of your team will inevitably change as your organization’s structure changes, so it’s crucial that you adapt your job descriptions to more accurately describe the work your team members are doing. This should be done both for roles you’re actively hiring for as well as for existing employees. Providing clarity to your team by codifying exactly what they are expected to do and will be evaluated against sets them up for success in a changing organizational structure, as well as makes it easier for you to see exactly where you may need to hire new resources to fill out your team.
It’s important to also revamp your job descriptions to make employees aware of the emerging technology they’ll be working with. One of our customers mentioned that their job descriptions make specific reference to the fact their centralized teams would be working alongside AI assistants from EliseAI that help with leasing and resident services. This is a best practice for a few reasons. For one, some people are apprehensive about working with AI. Being transparent about it upfront can reduce the risk that there’s a misalignment once the person actually takes the role. In addition, listing the usage of emerging technologies in a job description can actually help attract tech-savvy candidates for the role. For those reasons it’s important to keep your tech stack in mind when designing job descriptions for centralized team members.
Build a pilot set of communities to help test and iterate
Selecting a small group of pilot communities to start your centralization efforts is an important first step, because deploying new technology and processes at scale is going to be incredibly difficult without having done it on a limited basis first. We covered selecting communities for a centralized services pilot in depth here, but for now here are basic considerations to be taken into account.
For a third-party management company that has owned assets in their portfolio, these are often the first choice for a pilot program. Managers have more control over owned assets—even those with external equity partners—allowing them to pilot new tools without navigating the complexities of third-party client considerations. However, owned assets may not always be representative of the entire portfolio. To create a more impactful pilot, it’s advisable to include a mix of owned and third-party assets that encompass various asset types, sizes, and geographic regions, as these factors can significantly impact performance. That way, you can see the impact of new processes and technology has on the performance of a variety of representative properties, which will help you scale the centralization effort across your entire portfolio.
Invest in the right technology
You can do all the right things when it comes to preparing your organization for centralized property management operations and still fail if you have the wrong technology in place. It’s crucial to consider whether the tools you have in place are going to enable or hinder a transition to a centralized property management services model. For example, if your prospect data lives in one system and your resident data lives in another system it could create a disconnect that results in leads falling through the cracks or resident requests going unanswered.
It’s also important to think about investing in technology made to enable centralized teams to work efficiently at scale. New, AI-enabled solutions designed specifically for property management can both help your leasing teams field prospect inquiries around the clock and help your resident services teams improve resident engagement, reduce delinquencies, and accelerate renewals. And one company that just so happens to specialize in AI-enabled tools for centralized property management teams is EliseAI.
EliseAI has partnered with some of the largest single family rental operators in the U.S, including Invitation Homes, to enable their teams to work more efficiently in a centralized model with our LeasingAI, ResidentAI, and EliseCRM products. Elise’s humanlike AI assistants are able to converse with residents and prospects across email, SMS, webchat, and voice 24/7, helping centralized teams boost lead-to-lease rates by 30% and reduce delinquency by 52% on average. All of these interactions are subsequently pulled into EliseCRM, which acts as a single source of truth for all your contacts, conversations, and reporting, as well as serving as a knowledge bank that your AI assistants can pull information from in subsequent conversations. For single family rental operators looking to centralize their property management operations, EliseAI has all the tools required to enable the transition while also improving portfolio leasing performance and delivering better resident experiences.
Moving towards a centralized future
When it comes to the single family rental sector, it takes a combination of both procedural and technological changes to effectively centralize your property management operations. Following the steps our customers shared with us above can go a long way towards preparing your team for the transition, but if you don’t have the right solutions in place it’s still going to be difficult to effectively centralize your operations. That’s why companies like Invitation Homes utilize the full EliseAI product suite to enable their centralized teams to more effectively manage their leasing and property management operations. Fill out the form below to find out more about how EliseAI can help centralize your single family rental management operations today.