Investment Inception: How to Get Investor Owners to Trust Property Managers, with guest Shawn Johnson

Today we have a pretty cool guest on The Property Management Show Podcast. Shawn Johnson of Independence Capital Property Management is an investor and property manager, and he shares a lot of golden nuggets that will help property managers attract investors, and work better with investor clients.

Our focus is on the relationship between investors and property managers, and how the two worlds come together. There are a lot of misconceptions that keep investors from working well with property managers, and there are also misconceptions that keep property managers from offering more value and expertise to their investor clients.

We’re talking about solutions to all of that with Shawn.

Introducing Shawn Johnson

Shawn bought his first house in 2002 when he was 20 years old. The market was taking off, so he lived in the house as his primary residence for two years and then sold it, netting $65,000 in profit. That experience gave him the real estate investing bug.

His goal was to have three income-producing properties by the time he was 27 years old. That didn’t happen. He bought a car wash instead.

After that great first experience, he bought a property to flip. But he broke even and didn’t make any money on it. This was disappointing, but it didn’t stop him from becoming a smarter investor. He decided to forget flipping and invested in long-term rental homes instead.

The entrepreneurial bug took over and Shawn decided to make things happen.

He began acquiring more properties, and the first few rentals he managed himself. But, as soon as he brought staff onto his property management company, he was happy to hand over the management of those properties to the team of qualified property managers he had hired. Now, he has a portfolio of properties local to Farmington, New Mexico, and he also owns rental homes in Indianapolis. Those investments are also in the care of an experienced property manager.

How Property Managers Can Attract Investors

Property Management Investors: Being an Investor Makes you a Better Property Manager

Being an investor yourself shapes the way you run your property management company.

Investors want three things:

* The best tenant.

* The fastest tenant placement process.

* The highest rent.

Knowing this on a personal level has helped Shawn serve his investor clients better. It informs the leasing process at his company, and it allows him to share a different perspective for how to maximize investor gains.

If you’re a property manager who also invests in rental properties, you should position yourself as an investor-minded property management company. This is a shift that Shawn has made in his business over the last couple of years.

When current clients are asking to leverage their existing property to buy more rentals, you’re providing more value and growing your business. You can help clients with self-directed IRAs if they want to convert their 401k plan to buy investment property.

Make yourself available to investors as an investor.

Growing Your Business with Current Clients

Knowing your pool of existing clients can help property managers attract investors. When you decide to grow your business, you can go after new clients, but you can also see how you might be able to help your current clients.

Shawn noticed that his current investors were telling him they’d been thinking about selling their properties. Instead of putting those properties out on the open market, Shawn considered two things – did he want to buy the property himself? And, did he have other investor clients who might be interested in the opportunity?

When the property your investor is selling seems like a good fit for your own portfolio,