Hiring employees for your real estate business is essential to grow, but it is not easy.
With the right people you can grow faster and overcome any challenge.
Listen as Feras Moussa talks about how he approaches hiring employees and contractors for his real estate business.
Transcript:
Chris Bounds
Good people solved problems. When problems are solved there’s financial incentives for that usually for everyone involved. How did you find the root cause? You brought it down to 40%, it was not running well which means you solve the management problem. How did you find the people that were going to be able to solve that problem?
Feras Moussa 05:25
Referrals. Even right now, Ben and I were talking about this last night. About bringing in key strategic positions. Right. Really only being willing to do if someone’s referred. Right. It’s really hard to know if someone’s going to work out if it’s just blind faith. The resumes is nonsense. They mean nothing to me. Right. I mean, best resume can be the worst performer and vice versa.
I mean, the biggest thing is about referrals. Whether that’s hiring out an employee or hiring a property management company and so for us, it was a company that we know someone that was already in Atlanta. That’s why we picked the market that we knew someone is out there because multifamily it’s all about relationships. Right.
Whether it’s partners to get the deal done or people to operate. We had a friend out there that already had deals in Atlanta and who knows the market. We had a Rolodex that we could tap into. Right. And then, included property manager, we had a couple of different ones. He had one that he liked.
We went out there. We vetted three management companies got to know this one very well. They can handle that type of asset class. Right. It went really well. It was definitely chaos. Right. It was a tough deal. But they performed. We did our part and it worked out well. Just it’s referrals is key for that.
Chris Bounds 06:33
Love it. We got like 60 seconds left. You’re vertically integrated now realizing some of the problems that are inherent in property management. I remember some stories you told me early on. So now you’ve got that in house team that at least manages managers or creates the systems for effective property management.
What are some of the key takeaways for others to consider like not everyone’s going to vertically integrate but what are some of the things that folks should look for whether it’s single family or multi family when they’re trying to vet the right property manager for their asset?
Feras Moussa 07:12
Vetting a management company? Okay, so let’s see. So first thing is just look at their portfolio. Go ask them for deals that they manage and don’t tell them when you’re going out there, but go look at them. Right. I mean, there’s no management company is perfect.
What I’ve learned and management is my bar was here, it’s a really hard business. Get out there. Go look at things. Find people that are easy to get ahold of. Right. You have a business plan, but it’s constantly evolving to some extent. Find a management company that understands that and really understand your business plan. The reason we started our management companies, we literally fought back on it. We’d never once had a management company that asks us what is our business plan end to end. Right.
How are they gonna help us execute if they don’t even know what it is? Right. No one ever asked. So really get to know that and it’s people. In my last bit of feedback, I know we’re short on time is same as employee hire fast fire quicker. Right. We made the mistake of holding on way too long on a non performing management company here in Texas and we’ve paid that price. That was a big mistake in the sense that extra three months can really make a deal. Go further out there that you spend the next six months to recover from.
Chris Bounds 08:13
It is in another podcast. I heard you mentioned that you have assistants actually call in and almost do like test calls to the property management team to make sure that they’re answering calls and actually following up like, I loved that tip.