The Power of Action Versus Perfectionism in Video Marketing

Marc Cunningham is a property management consultant and he’s also the President of Grace Property Management in Colorado.

He’s joining The Property Management Show today not only because he’s a prominent figure in property management, but also because he’s one of the first property management professionals who embraced video marketing.

Marc is still promoting video marketing, and he believes it’s the most effective way to bring new business into your company.

A Bit of Background: Marc Cunningham

When Marc started his property management career as a child going to the office with his dad, things were incredibly different. It was the 1970s and buying their first copy machine was the most technology they had. The phone with an answering machine was fancy. Ledger cards were used to manually record when rent was collected, and checks were written to owners once a month.

His father recognized that technology was a great tool, and they not only got a computer before anyone else, but they also even hired a programmer out of California to write a custom property management program for them.

In the property management industry, there’s a big scare every couple of years.

The narrative goes, if you don’t do X, you’ll be left behind. Right now, it’s AI. If you’re not using AI, you’ll be left behind.

Marc says this is not always true. Provide good customer service to owners and tenants, and you’ll be okay even without the latest tool. You won’t wake up one day and be left behind.

It’s the shiny thing syndrome. If there’s something that everyone seems to be doing, you feel like you should be doing it, too.

It’s easy to chase the next big thing because everybody is talking about how cool it is.

Marc doesn’t chase the newest thing. Technology is something to leverage in order to improve your property management business.

After graduating from college with a degree in finance and real estate, Marc worked in the industry but not for his father. This helped him when it was time to go to work for his father. He brought a different perspective and a different set of skills to the family business. He always tells people in a family business to send the young people out to work outside of the business for a few years. It generates better ideas and higher level thinking.

Marc arrived at his father’s company with more of a business mindset. His father was very good at property management, and Marc found he was very good at business management.

Pioneering Video and Property Management Marketing

Marc is one of the first property management professionals to begin marketing his company with video. He still believes this is the best marketing tool for property managers.

Here’s how it happened.

He was at a conference, and on the way home from that conference, he began thinking about how much time he spent talking to potential owner clients. They all ask the same questions and he found himself having the same conversation over and over again. Wouldn’t it be great, he thought, if, instead of answering those common questions over and over again, he could put those answers in a video and have it on his website. Then, potential owner clients could watch the video and decide if they wanted to know more. Marc thought that if a video could save him multiple five-minute conversations, it would really add up to getting some serious time back.

He’s action-oriented and he doesn’t over-think.

So, when he got home, he had his then-11-year-old son stand on his desk with an iPhone and take a video of Marc talking about common property management expenses.

It was a three-minute video that included no script, no special lighting, and no microphone. The point was not quality. The point was to get it done.

This has worked better than any other marketing, Marc says, because prospective owner clients will call,