What if the biggest obstacle to growing your property management business isn't your marketing... but who you're attracting? In this #DoorGrowShow episode, Jason Hull breaks down why traditional marketing advice is keeping property managers stuck competing for price-sensitive owners while overlooking a massive untapped market. Drawing from nearly two decades of coaching hundreds of property management entrepreneurs, he explains why warm, relationship-driven growth consistently outperforms cold digital marketing. Jason also explores the hidden operational costs of attracting the wrong clients, why communication isn't the real reason owners leave, how poor boundaries destroy profitability, and why your business should be built around trust.

You'll Learn

[00:00] Why Industry Surveys Miss Real Growth Opportunities [04:58] Understanding Cheapos, Normals, and Premium Buyers [10:43] The Blue Ocean Most Property Managers Ignore [16:40] Why Communication Isn't the Real Problem [22:08] Escaping the "Cycle of Suck" [28:18] Setting Better Boundaries with Owners [34:55] Why Offline Marketing Wins [42:06] Building Growth Engines Instead of Buying Leads [50:14] Hidden Profit Leaks Every Property Manager Has

Quotables

"Where you get your leads dictates the quality of the lead and how much they're willing to spend." Jason Hull

"They don't even want to buy property management. What they want to buy is a trusted advisor." Jason Hull

"Interruptions are the biggest thief in the property management business of profitability." Jason Hull

Resources

DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind

Transcript

Jason Hull (00:00)

Hey everybody, I'm Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGro, the world's leading and most comprehensive coaching and consulting firm for long-term residential property management entrepreneurs. For over a decade and a half, we have brought innovative strategies and optimization to the property management industry. At DoorGro, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses.

We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. Now let's get to the show. Okay, so today's episode,

I'm going to share from my anecdotal experience in talking to thousands of property managers and all the feedback that I get, and all the people that are in our mastermind, what we're seeing is working. So here's what a survey can't show: a survey is basically lagging data, it's not showcasing what's

Innovating because you're not even usually asking questions about the latest innovations. So the questions inherent in this survey, my guess, are slightly flawed because they aren't asking some of the things I would ask based on all of the data and information that I get from this weird sort of fly-in-the-wall vantage point that I have in the industry.

we've always pushed this idea of three different types of buyers: cheapos, normals, and premiums.

Most cheapos self-manage. They exclude themselves from the pool of property management buyers. And then there's a small percentage that eventually go through the funnel online, and then you can capture through marketing. And these are this is what most companies base their pricing around, is based around the cheapos that they can get through internet marketing. Well, the best stuff usually comes through word of mouth or

Further out into the blue ocean. And so if you would like to see more about this, you can get my leads training by going to drgrw.com, which is doorgrow.com, or just go to doorgrow.com slash leads. So do the shortened URL or the longer URL slash leads. And you'll see our there is a clarity assessment you can do. There is a free training, and then you can book a call with our team.

And hear about some of the innovative gross strategies and stuff that we're doing with clients. So the thing to realize is that a lot of you know, it's showcasing these boomers as cheapos. And the the other thing though is it's it's saying that like 62% are represented here. And I think that the numbers of people that actually use property management is far lower than the 500 they surveyed. There's probably also a lot of people that

Aren't even aware of property management, even though they need it. There is this massive blue ocean. I think the numbers are probably more, maybe around 40-50% are self-managing versus using a property manager. And there's a lot of available potential business out there. And they're not looking on the internet. So here is some data that's not in the PM Trends report, but it's on trends.google.com. So if you go to trends.google.com.

And I just threw up an article on LinkedIn today before recording this episode. But if you go to this, go to Google Trends, backdate it to 2004 to the present, what and put in property management. And then feel free to add some other keywords like AI would be very telling, because we've seen the rise, meteoric rise lately of AI in terms of awareness and search volume. Put in real estate is another great keyword so you can kind of see.

What you'll notice is property management is such a minuscule amount of search volume, it barely registers compared to these other terms. And it spikes every summer and goes down every winter. If you remove those terms, is what you'll see. Now, in the last year, there's been a little bit of an uptick for the first time in basically two decades, which is amazing, which is awesome. That means market share is starting to maybe start to shift a little bit and grow. But there is this huge blue ocean of people that will never search the internet.

For property management. And that doesn't mean that they like doing it themselves. This survey probably isn't able to touch any of those people. And this, these are some of the people I get my clients to go after the most. Why? Because it's way cheaper. There's a huge blue ocean of people that are not looking on the internet for property management. The people that are looking on the internet are at the end of the sales cycle. These are typically the worst owners in a lot of instances.

Why? Because word of mouth captures the best stuff first and then the shitty stuff that falls off that table, the scraps that fall off the word of mouth table. Those are the people now that don't care about word of mouth or they don't care who people say is great. They think you're a commodity. They're looking for the cheapest company. And so generally there's a much higher percentage of cheapos that you're going to attract by doing digital or internet-based marketing.

YouTube. The challenge is there's a large percentage of owners that are not looking or searching for property management. They're not looking for property management stuff on YouTube. They're not looking for property management stuff on Google. They're not looking at all. They don't care about property management. Most people

That are even property managers are not usually consuming content around property management. Not very often. A lot of them self-identify as more of a real estate brokerage or real estate agent or anything else that they think is cooler. I even had a client I was coaching recently, and he said that he's really had this mental block, this mental block about wanting to tell people that he's a property manager. And I said, Don't tell people that you're a property manager.

Property managers in your market, he was in New York, are basically somebody that sits in a big building that, you know, they they help do leasing. That's kind of people's perception. You are an asset portfolio manager. You are an investment specialist. There's so many other ways you can present yourself. You are the entrepreneur that hires the property manager. I don't want my clients to identify as property managers. I want them to identify as an entrepreneur because identity limits growth.

the second thing that filters, which is perception. There's a really negative perception about property managers among real estate agents, among investors that are aware that most property managers, if I have you in a room and I say by show of hands, how many of you started your business? Because all of the other property managers in your market sucked. Usually almost everybody's hands go up. And then my joke usually is, but not yours, right?

And then they all laugh. So, but nobody wakes up in the morning wanting to start a crappy company.

So you could waste a massive amount of time trying to do a bunch of social media marketing, a bunch of YouTube videos, a bunch of content creation. And it's not generally going to get you the best clients because where you get your leads dictates the quality of the lead and how much they're willing to spend. And what we find is the clients you can connect with offline through warm lead strategies.

through direct outreach, through creating relationships, through networking,...