From Frustration to Opportunity
It seems like just yesterday that I was frustrated with all of my property managers who were supposed to be “looking after” my rental properties. One property had been trashed and the other had the tenants skip town. Costing me thousands of dollars was frustrating enough but what really annoyed me was having none of my calls and emails returned over a whole week, while I lay awake in bed at night worrying how I was going to pay the mortgages. Just what Landlord nightmares are made of!
As I looked around it seemed that no one in Perth was doing it well. It was around that time that Denise (My Previous Business Partner) and I had the bright idea that surely managing properties in Perth can be done better, with an investment mindset and great service.
With that inspiration and burning desire, Investors Edge Real Estate was created.
The Challenge of a Lifetime
I never realised at the beginning how much there was to property management let alone business!
Systems, Marketing, Staff, Recruiting, Sales, Copy Writing, Accounting, Technology, Maintenance, the Residential Tenancy Act, Legal, Web Development, Social Media… Just to name a few areas. The amount of knowledge required to be successful in business is so exhaustive, that had I known as much as I do now at the beginning I may not have made the leap from engineering to business at all.
It is no wonder why 90% of businesses fail in the first 5 years and why 90% of those that survive fail in the second 5 years.
Time Was Not On Our Side
My two core strengths are continuous learning and implementation. So given enough time, I think I would be able to find the right people or information to be a success at most things.
Unfortunately when you start a business, time is not on your side and I quickly found myself out of money and I had to move back home to live with my parents. They had given away my bedroom so the only place left to sleep was a mattress on the lounge room floor. It really made me question whether business was for me and the answer was – YES!
So How Did We Succeed?
We started out the business knowing what investors wanted because we were investors ourselves but we never stopped asking our clients what they wanted and making sure we changed things to deliver it. Forget everything else, if we were just able to go the extra mile to help improve our tenants and landlords lives the rest would take care of itself and it did.
As we started to grow we were able to find amazing people to come on the journey with us- the right team members, clients and tradespeople made all the difference to our success and it made things so much more fun to come to work.
Even today I am so grateful that so many amazing people have stuck with me, I certainly couldn’t continue without you!
What is Next?
We have got an exciting year ahead of us.
We have just been named as Finalist again for the LPMA National Property Management Awards on 9th & 10th of May which is something all the team should be very proud of. It’s one thing to have won many awards in the past but its another thing to consistently deliver service at such a high standard.
We have our 10th Anniversary Celebration coming up on Friday 25th May so clients should keep an eye out for their invite. It will be a great chance to reflect and thank everyone who has been apart of our journey so far.
Finally, we are about to the launch the trial of the first of it’s kind Franchise for Property Managers, empowering them to build their own lifestyle business working from home no more than 10 minutes from the properties they manage. Offering highly personalised, local property management with an investment mindset and the full training and back end support so they can focus on serving clients exceptionally well. This will allow us to increase efficiencies, reduce overheads and look to pass on a fee reduction over time to our clients.
I am more excited about the future of Investors Edge now then I was 10 years ago and I can’t wait to share it with you.
Read an article on: “Why All Property Investors Need Landlord Insurance!”
