The SFR PM industry largely treats lease terms as a binary decision: either 12 months or month-to-month. Very rarely do I see a PM with more options, and I’ve consulted for PMs all over the country. If a PM deviates from those options, it’s almost invariably a “one-off” favor that someone is doing for a tenant or an owner (a problem in and of itself).
But our industry is pretty rare in this regard. Every airline, hotel, and car rental company on earth prices their services based on flexibility. If you’re willing to let the airline pick your seat on departure day, they’ll charge you less. If you don’t care which car you get, the rental company will charge you less. And some consumers absolutely love this flexibility. Flexibility itself is a product. You should be selling it.
But the really funny thing here is that we don’t even need to go outside of our space to look at companies like airlines and hotels to see this. Right under our own noses in the multifamily industry, flexible lease terms have been a thing for a very long time. For a few years right after I got married, I was splitting my time between Atlanta and Chicago. While I owned my home in Atlanta, we were renting in the suburbs of Chicago from an apartment complex. When we got our annual renewal notice, it included a huge range of available lease terms. You could renew for 12 months for the normal rent amount, or you could go month-to-month for DOUBLE the normal rent, and a bunch of other options with rent priced in between. This is pretty common in the MF world. Why is most of the SFR world not doing this?
So today, for paid subscribers and Crane members, we’re going to talk about how to structure this and implement it into your own PM company. Right after our PMAssist Partners (check them out!):
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