In the past 30 days, our National Team at Real Estate Dynamics has spoken with 3,296 Rent Roll Principals – either on the phone, face to face or on a video meeting. That’s pretty standard in our line of work. The reason our team makes these calls is to see if the Principal is intending to Grow or Sell.
What astonishes me each month is around one third of these Principals (549 of them) say that they are doing neither.
“We’re doing okay.”
“We’re fine thanks.”
“We have decided to stay where we are for now.”
Said calmly. Said without complaint. Said, often, by Principals who haven’t grown their Rent Roll in net numbers for years.
It used to bother me – a lot. Because in Rent Rolls, there is no “okay.” You are either growing or going.
Your Rent Roll business does not sit still just because you’ve decided not to push it. In fact, the opposite is true. It depletes (and sometimes at a rapid pace).
According to Real Estate Dynamics’ data warehouse – the largest data warehouse for Rent Roll sales, consultancy and training in Australia – the annual attrition rate on a Rent Roll sits at 14.2% per annum. 8% are uncontrollable losses and 6.2% are controllable. Yes, that is right – for each 100 properties you have under management, you can expect 14 to leave you each year and that number does not pause for Principals who are “okay”.
Do the maths on that: if you are not adding at least 14.2% in new management each year just to “stand still”, you are shrinking. Quietly, steadily, and often invisibly – right up until the day it isn’t invisible anymore. And at this point, many try to sell without experiencing an exceptional selling value. Who wants to buy a “shrinking” Rent Roll?
So why would a Principal, staring down that number, describe their business as “okay”?
After enough of these conversations, a pattern has emerged that has nothing to do with ambition, or laziness, or not understanding the market. The Principals who say they’re “okay” are, in a large number of cases, not lacking the desire to grow. They’re lacking the belief that their business could absorb growth if it came. I have always believed the growth is the easy part, and it’s the fear of absorbing growth that is the real challenge in our industry.
Growth isn’t just more new Managements in the CRM. Growth is:
For a Principal who knows (even if they don’t say it out loud) that their current operations are stretched, or that they’ve never really worked out what drives profitability and value in their Rent Roll, growth doesn’t feel like opportunity. It feels like a threat. It’s not that they don’t want more properties under management, it’s that they can’t have more properties under management with their current operations.
So, “we’re okay” becomes the safer story to tell. It’s not resignation, rather it’s self-protection. If you don’t reach for growth, you don’t have to find out whether your business can carry it.
The irony is that this is exactly backwards. The businesses most afraid of growth are usually the ones with the least room to lose ground – because at 14.2% attrition, “standing still” was never actually an option.
Rent Rolls that are scalable and have built in efficiencies in these Rent Rolls are buying up Rent Rolls who are operationally stretched at a rate we have never seen before. It’s not the bigger buying the smaller, it’s the efficient and scalable buying the inefficient and non-scalable.
You cannot talk a Principal out of this fear with a “pep talk” about ambition. The fear is rational – it’s a correct read of a business that hasn’t yet built the profit drivers, the systems, or the growth strategy to scale with confidence. The only way to remove the fear of growth is to remove the reasons for it: understand what actually drives Rent Roll profitability, build a framework for scaling sustainably, build in efficiency across the operations and know exactly what makes the business valuable in the first place.
We see this play out in practice. Principals we’ve worked with across Australia are maximising their efficiency and profits – one Principal in Queensland added $38,746 a year in net profit simply by redesigning their routine inspection systems with our team. This Rent Roll had 392 Properties Under Management at the time.
Another business we have worked with in the Hunter Valley region engaged us when they had a Rent Roll of 368 PUM. Through efficiency and scaling, they are now entrusted with 2,099 properties, and the staffing ratio to properties under management has skyrocketed by 272.5%. That’s profitable. That’s efficient. That’s scalable and it’s a very valuable Rent Roll. And they are actively on the lookout for more acquisitions and a lot more organic growth! This growth comes with confidence, not fear.
That’s why we built Expert Leader. More Profit through efficiency. More scalability through embedding business principles. More growth – organic and acquisition. More money in your bank with business asset value when you decide to sell and move on.
Expert Leader is our one-day Leadership Intensive, built specifically for Principals, Directors, Business Owners, Department Managers and General Managers who are ready to move past “okay” and build a Rent Roll business that can genuinely absorb growth.
When: Thursday, 19th November
Where: The Langham Hotel Melbourne, 1 Southgate Avenue, Southbank, Melbourne VIC
Capacity: 50 seats
Presented by: Nathan Brett, CEO of Real Estate Dynamics — 32+ years in the industry, 4,000+ hours of hands-on consultancy, and someone who personally grew a Rent Roll more than four times before selling his own business. https://realestatedynamics.com.au/staff-profiles/nathan-brett/
The day is structured around the exact anxieties that keep Principals stuck at “okay”:
By the end of the day, attendees walk away with a growth-ready Rent Roll strategy built on the right people, processes and performance measures — and a way past the tired organic-versus-acquisition debate, toward a growth strategy that actually fits their goals.
Pricing: $716 (member) / $895 (general), GST inclusive, with full catering across the day. Seats are limited to 50.
If you’re a Principal reading this and “we’re okay” sounds familiar, the more useful question isn’t “do we want to grow?” It’s: if 20 new managements landed on our desk next month, would our profit and our business value get stronger, or would it just get bigger and messier?
If the honest answer makes you uneasy, that unease is the actual signal – not a reason to stay “okay”, but a reason to build the leadership and profit foundations that make growth something you control, rather than something you fear. At 14.2% attrition a year, standing still was never really on the table. The only real choice is whether you grow on purpose or go by default.
