Owners, rarely, and by situation
How much do property managers charge, should I use a letting agent, what to do with an inherited house, first-time landlord obligations. Low volume, high value, and almost nobody writes for it.
Property
Property management marketing aimed at owners, not tenants
A property manager arrived here with organic traffic that had tripled and owner enquiries that had not moved. The extra traffic was tenants searching for rentals, a service cost rather than revenue, and the site had no page for an owner deciding whether to hand over a property. Almost all the search volume comes from tenants, and almost all the revenue comes from owners.
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Marketing does not behave the same way here.
Property management is a two-sided business where the two sides have opposite marketing economics. Tenants search constantly, in large numbers, for available properties, and every one of them costs money to serve and produces no direct revenue. Owners search rarely, in small numbers, and one of them can be worth years of management fees.
A site and an ad account built around search volume are therefore built around the wrong audience, and the reporting looks excellent while the business does not grow.
Owner acquisition is triggered by events: an inherited property, a relocation, a first buy-to-let, a tenant problem, or a manager who stopped answering. And portals dominate the results for anything tenant-facing, which is a reason to stop competing there rather than a reason to try harder.
How your customers actually search.
Owners, urgently, when something failed
Switching property manager, agent not responding, problem tenant, eviction process. A trigger event that makes a settled owner available for the first time in years.
Tenants, constantly, and expensively
Properties to rent in an area, with filters. Enormous volume, dominated by portals, and it converts into work rather than into revenue.
How an enquiry becomes a customer.
Different intents take different routes. Serving all of them with one page is the most common structural mistake in this industry.
- An owner trigger event, then research on cost and on what a manager actually does for the fee.
- A shortlist of two or three local firms, compared largely on fee structure and on responsiveness.
- A conversation, then a management agreement that lasts years, which is why one owner is worth so much more than the enquiry count suggests.
- The whole site built around the property listings, which serves tenants and gives an owner nothing to read.
- No fee information, when what property managers charge is one of the highest-intent owner searches there is.
- Nothing written for the trigger events, so the firm is absent at the only moments an owner is actually available.
- Traffic reported as a headline number without splitting owner-intent from tenant-intent, which makes a growing tenant audience look like marketing success.
- Owner-intent campaigns only, with tenant search terms added as negatives rather than treated as cheap traffic.
- Campaigns aimed at switching, which is where a settled owner becomes reachable and where the competition is thinnest.
- Geographic restriction to the areas actually managed, since an owner outside the service area is pure waste at a high click cost.
- Negatives against rent, to let, tenant, jobs, courses and property for sale, which otherwise consume most of the budget.
- Owner nurture over long periods, since the gap between first contact and handing over a property is often measured in months.
- Portfolio growth to existing owners, because an owner who buys a second property is the cheapest new management contract available.
What the report should lead with.
- Owner enquiries, reported separately from all other contact
- Properties under management, and net change including churn
- Cost per owner acquired against expected management fee lifetime
- Owner enquiry share of total site traffic, tracked as a ratio
On camera
Four clients on camera, in their own words.
Four clients, four industries, one thing in common: the number moved and they said so on camera.
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It is the best long-term investment we have made in the company, full stop.
Ahmed · Business owner · SEO
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The cost per lead from organic is a fraction of what we pay on ads, and that math gets better every month.
Sandra · Founder · SEO
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People can book a table without calling during the dinner rush. My host actually thanked me.
Aaliyah · Restaurant owner · Website
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These tech geeks know the Facebook analytics and the data and the pixels and all that stuff that makes a musician’s head explode.
David · The Wankers · Social ads
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Questions from this industry.
01 Should a property manager try to rank for rental listings?
Generally no. Those results are dominated by portals with inventory and budgets no local firm can match, the traffic costs you money to serve, and the visitor is not your customer. Publish your available properties for the tenants you already have coming, and put the marketing effort where the revenue is.
02 How do we tell owner traffic from tenant traffic?
Segment it in Search Console and analytics by landing page and by query intent, then report the two separately every month. It is a small piece of setup and it changes the conversation immediately, because most firms discover that the number they have been celebrating is almost entirely tenants.
03 Should a property manager publish the management fee?
At least the structure and the range. What property managers charge is one of the highest-intent owner searches in the sector, and a firm that will not answer it sends the owner to one that will. Fee alone rarely decides the choice, but refusing to discuss it removes you from the comparison before it starts.
04 Where do new property owners actually come from?
In the firms seen here, a mix of referral, existing owners buying more property, and a small number of search enquiries triggered by an event. The marketable part is the third, and it is small in volume and large in value. The other two are worth systematising rather than leaving to chance, which is what the email side of this is for.