The Bat Phone
The best move I made in my first building was a second cell phone. What it taught me about answering the phone, listening, and why people still fail at property management.
When I took over my first property in 2011, I was smart enough to do one thing right. I went out and got a second cell phone. It was an old clamshell flip phone with its own number, and I gave that number to the tenants instead of mine.
That was probably the best move I ever made in this business. The phone outlived the building’s first renovation. When I started hiring people, it got passed around. “You’re getting the bat phone.” It was the emergency line, the leasing line, the complaint line and the maintenance line, because we were not sophisticated enough to have call trees or an answering service. We just answered the phone.
I think about that phone a lot now, because it explains most of what I believe about running apartments.
Answering the phone is the whole job
Property management is not brain surgery. People still fail at it, and I have spent a long time trying to understand why. The answer I keep coming back to is that the industry has made it complicated in all the wrong places and simple in none of the right ones.
Almost every apartment community we manage has existed for decades. It has drive-by visibility. There is demand for apartments no matter what rents do. So the simplest rule in the business is this: put a sign out front with a phone number that works, and answer the phone. Then listen to what the person wants and accommodate them.
Nowadays there is an answering service and nobody gets a response. In those early days I heard the phone ring, I screened the call, and I dealt with the problem. When someone called angry about a leak, I turned around and called the maintenance guy and said, get over there and fix this. There was no misinterpretation, because I heard the problem from the horse’s mouth.
Leasing is sales, and sales is listening. If you can sell, you can have a full property. Most operators understaff and undertrain the sales side and then wonder why the numbers do not move. If you are a leasing agent and you do not know your closing ratio, you are not really a leasing agent yet.
Listening puts out the fire
Here is what surprised me in that first building. Most of the time, just listening to the problem put out the fire.
A resident calls about a pest problem, or a leak, or a neighbor. Their problem is not that big, but they have made it really big in their head, and they want someone to hear it. If you listen, say you understand, apologize for the part that deserves an apology, and ask what else is going on, they calm down. Then you get to the root of the problem and it is usually simple to solve.
The same thing happened with leasing. I got stood up a lot showing apartments. Then I realized that if I called or texted ahead of time, I could save myself a trip across town. That is not a system. That is paying attention.
If you are attuned to what people are telling you, you pick up everything else too: other tenants’ issues, opportunities to improve, objections you will hear again from the next prospect. When we started doing full gut renovations years later, I was in the units with a spray can laying out the floor plans myself. I had listened to so many tenants tell me what worked and what did not that it was second nature to say, this is what I want in my units. Those layouts got us top of market rents. That came from the bat phone.
What ownership looked like before we had a word for it
When you are in charge of everything, you cannot avoid a problem. There is no drawer to put it in.
That is the part of ownership most people never experience. In a bigger company it is easy for a problem to get buried, ignored or handed sideways, because people are scared of it. Scared for their job, scared of the owner, scared of being wrong. When I had one building and one phone, if I knew something needed to be done, I had to do it. I was limited only by the hours in the day, and in those days there were enough hours.
I did not have an aha moment about ownership. I made a lot of mistakes early. I started with a Word document as a lease and eventually graduated to a real Texas Apartment Association form. You just evolve. But the habit of addressing the problem head on, right now, from the person who has it, was formed in those first two and a half years with no employees.
Scaling the phone
The hard part is scaling that habit into a company of a couple hundred people managing thousands of units. You cannot hand everyone a flip phone.
What we try to teach every team member is that anything they see, feel or hear is valuable information, and it goes up. Do not ignore the obvious. Why did the city inspector show up at the property today? “I don’t know, they left.” That is important, because they might be looking for something. Communicate it up, big or small, even if you think it is nothing.
Where I am pushing hardest now is using technology to do what the bat phone did: make sure the information lands somewhere it cannot be ignored. Every incident that happens on a property gets logged, the way a maintenance work order does, so the system can sort what matters from what does not. A bank inspection. Fire extinguishers expiring. A vendor who walked into one office and got told “we already have a painter” when the property down the street has none. That vendor should be in our system, not lost at one front desk.
We built a digital incident report so people can file one from their phone with photos, on the spot, instead of going back to a computer to type it up in Word. It is off their plate in two minutes. That matters because six months later there can be a lawsuit, and nobody knew there was a situation that should have been documented. Incident reports are a big deal even when the incident is small.
The lost art
Half of our team are maintenance professionals doing hard work every day, and nobody calls them with a happy moment. It is always why aren’t you here, why is my air conditioning out, why did nobody call me back. The bar for exceptional service in this industry is low. If you just do the basics, you are already exceeding the norm.
That is not a cynical observation. It is the opportunity. The basics are a sign with a working number, someone who answers, someone who listens, and someone who fixes it and calls back. I learned all four on a flip phone in a 24-unit building. Everything we have built since, including the software, is an attempt to make sure a company of two hundred people still answers the phone.