How To Handle The Real Estate Time Sucks In Your Business

Do You Have Clients Who Are Real Estate Time Sucks?

I'll admit that until recently I'd never heard the term 'real estate time suck' before.

The other day I was on the phone chatting with my attorney when she mentioned that a case she was working on was an incredible time suck, which in this case meant increased legal fees for the client.

When you bill by the hour having time suck situations is probably a good thing.

In real estate, more often than not, we're paid for actual results. If a property is sold or leased, we're paid. If nothing happens, we're not.

Often times property management fees are based on a percentage of gross monthly revenue, so again, the more cash flow the real estate investor receives the more you're paid. Lower cash flow means lower property management income.

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You probably have real estate time sucks that you work with right now, maybe without even realizing it.

Real estate time sucks are those people that you end up working for free for.

Clients, vendors, tenants, brokers, agents, suppliers – all can be time sucks when they take up a lot of your time without generating a commensurate level of income.

Your real estate practice is a professional service.

Can you imagine meeting with your accountant for an hour, thanking them for their time and advice, and expecting Not to pay them?

Your revenues will actually increase when you starting weeding out the real estate time sucks in your business even though you'll end up reducing the number of people you work with.

Every year I take a look at the people I work with in my business and identify the time suck ones that I end up working for free for.

And I get rid of them.

At first it’s a scary thing to do because you’re actually going to lose some money at first.

The trick is to take all of the extra time you have and focus it on the revenue producing clients you’ve got and to get new worth-while people to work with.

Here are three areas of your business that you may have real estate time sucks in, without even realizing it:

Property Owners

If you’re a broker or in property management you’ve likely got some high maintenance clients.

A while back I had a similar case myself.

We had one property owner that generated about 25% of our management revenue. The problem was that dealing with the guy sucked up 4X the amount of time compared to our other clients.

I finally cut him loose, and guess what?

Over the next two months we were able to use the extra time that was no longer being sucked up by this property owner to double the revenue that we’d lost from him.

Property Manager

If you’re a property owner you may be in a situation where your property management company is sucking up a lot of your time by forcing you to be involved in making petty decisions, such as reviewing plumbing bids for a stopped up sink.

Maybe the management company is doing this as part of their CYA routine or maybe they’re not clear on what your expectations are.

As the client you’ve got to decide which is which, but if you have a property manager like this, then you’re working for free without realizing it.

Tenants

Tenants can often me the biggest real estate time sucks of them all.

You may have a tenant that, like clock work, always has a maintenance request right around the time the rent is due.

Or maybe they always have to be chased down for the rent.

=> Learn More About How To Change Tenant Behavior

If you’re a property owner and you’ve got a management company that deals with this, you may be thinking that it’s not your problem.

But believe me, the extra expense that the property manager incurs in dealing with this time suck tenant will come back to you, the property owner, in one way or another.

If you’re not sure that you have a real estate time suck tenant, ask yourself this question, “Do they pay their rent?”.

If the answer is, “Yes, but . . . .” then the tenant is a time suck.

In real estate most of what we do is fee based, so the natural reaction is to take a quantity over quality approach, to have as many clients as possible, with the idea that more clients means more potential revenue.

There are a lot of problems with this approach, one of which is you end up attracting more than your share of time suck clients.

Jeffrey Roark
Basic Property Management Training
How To Make Real Estate Wealth Fast