We talk about recruitment a lot in property management, and reading the results from the recent Kolmeo survey, there are important questions we need to address.
Where are the next Property Managers coming from?
How do we attract them?
How are we going to solve the talent shortage?
But perhaps there’s another one we should ask first.
Why are so many experienced Property Managers struggling to see a future in the profession?
The results of this report noted that nearly two in five Property Managers were unlikely to remain in the industry over the next two years, while nearly two out of three Property Managers described their workload as overwhelming.
Those numbers matter.
But what’s more interesting is what didn’t appear to be driving retention.
Portfolio size wasn’t a consistent predictor. Neither was agency type, nor was changing technology on and of its own.
Maybe we’ve spent too much time looking at the obvious symptoms.
One of the strongest indicators of whether someone intended to stay was whether they could actually see a long-term future for themselves in property management.
Among those who could see that future, 77% of them intended to stay; but among those who couldn’t, that fell to 17%.
That’s a telling gap; and maybe people aren’t leaving because they dislike property management.
Maybe they’re leaving because the version of staying they can see doesn’t look very appealing. They see their future as having:
- More properties.
- More responsibility.
- More pressure.
- More risk.
- And not enough opportunity to grow.
That’s a retention problem, and recruitment on its own won’t solve it.
Every experienced Property Manager who leaves takes with them years of judgement, client knowledge, legislative understanding and confidence built through difficult situations.
You can replace a person, but you can’t and won’t replace that experience overnight.
So before we spend all our time asking where the next generation of Property Managers will come from, perhaps we should spend a little more time asking what might encourage this generation to stay. Property management doesn’t just need more people coming through the front door.
It needs to give the good people already here more reasons not to walk out the back one.