Michael McVety is currently the General Manager of Realty Services Property Management in Fort Myers, Florida. His diverse background that includes six years military experience, three years teaching and two years as a school administrator has provided him a unique perspective on the property management industry. This perspective has specifically benefited Realty Services, as he has assisted with successfully navigating the company through the economic ups and downs of the last several years.
Michael currently serves on several Real Estate Property Management boards to help promote professionalism in the industry as well as to discuss issues with today’s top leaders. Michael served as the president for the Lee-Collier Chapter of NARPM®, President of the Florida Association of Residential Property Managers and Vice-President of the Southwest Florida Apartment Association. He currently serves on the Florida Chapter of NARPM® board of directors.
You have quite a diverse background with your years in the military and employment as a school administrator. How did you get into the property management business?
MM: You could say that I’m second-generation in the business. My father established a property management company a long time ago, long before it was ever considered fashionable to have a property management company. He started it in 1981, and it grew over time. I didn’t grow up thinking that I wanted to manage properties, so when I did eventually move down to Florida it was actually to teach. I had been living in Canada, serving in the Canadian Reserves and studying in school. I was hired as a schoolteacher for a private school in Florida, where I ended up teaching for the next few years and then became the school administrator. While teaching, I eventually decided to help my father on a part time basis and started to learn the trade. I eventually left the school and became a property manager for the company in 1995, and then General Manager a couple years later.
What are some of the challenges that you’ve faced in your business, and how do you effectively deal with those?
One of the other challenges during this time was to make the decision of whether or not to lay people off. Until that time, part of our company ethics was that nobody had ever been laid off for financial reasons. I took that quite seriously. However, when your income is declining, it becomes very hard for you not to try to make some type of economic change in your company. And one of the things we looked at was whether or not now was the time to lay people off. Both my father, who was running the company at the time, and I fought that.
After we made the decision to keep everyone, we grappled with how to grow our company – and also how to manage that growth. When we decided to grow our company, in a matter of two years we went from having two property managers and two support staff to having five property managers and five support staff. So we went from having a handful of people that were pretty independent to now a much larger organization. With any company there are two aspects that you have to deal with. The first is the technical aspect of knowing state rules and regulations – what happens if tenants don’t pay rent, what type of notice to give, occupancy requirements, etc. The other aspect that the vast majority of property managers or business owners have to deal with is how to actually run a business. So that has been the challenge for me – how do I grow a business and keep it together.
There are challenges you face when your business is growing, just as there are challenges when your business is shrinking, albeit different types of challenges. We’ve gone from 400 units to about 590 in the last eighteen months or so. So our challenges include how do we train people, how do we try to keep the quality there, etc. I deal with some of these challenges by reading, discussing things with my broker who’s been in the business for a long time. Also talking to other business leaders, not even necessarily property managers, but other business leaders in the area to gain insight.
What tools or habits do you utilize to help grow your business?
MM: First of all, you have a lot of systems to support you, such as email, your website, etc. However what I find interesting is that the reason for our growth, and currently I would say our success, does not actually have to do with technology. Technology accentuates who you are. So if you really don’t understand what you’re doing, or you don’t know where you’re going, technology is not going to help you, in fact it will only increase the level of confusion. So I’d say that the habits that have changed our company are that we’re really trying to focus on what it is that we do well and how we can be better. After you come to those conclusions, then that’s when the technology comes in.
When I use a company like HERO, which is very easy to use, it’s actually in a little way a bit of a trap. As you guys are so diligently creating more services and systems and updating your software, like for instance PROMAS does, you run the problem of not taking advantage of some of these new features. So one of habits that I’m starting to do is read about all the updates from all the vendors like HERO. I’ve started, for instance, attending some of your training classes – at one point I took the same training seminar twice. I have a lot of things that I’m learning and I want to make sure that I’m not forgetting anything. So another habit that I’m trying to work on as a General Manager is to understand that even though I’m not always changing vendors, because I think the vendors that I have are good, I have to understand that my vendors are changing and that I have to consciously make an effort to understand what new services they’re providing and then make a decision if this is something that I can utilize or not.
How has HERO been able to benefit your business?
MM: I think overwhelmingly that anybody who’s in property management today needs to have certain vendors that handle the backend, or administrative functions. One of the things is marketing your properties, and I think that is one of the surprising benefits that we have using HERO systems. What’s really interesting about HERO over the years is how they create strategic alliances with people to say, get your properties out on the Internet. It is built as a way to take my properties and make it easy for me to show people what my units are that are available for rent.
To say that I’m pleased with HERO would be an understatement. From the ability to create flyers simplistically, to even its feedback in terms of clicks on individual properties, to just the general interface is great. The list can go on, but HERO is just a very important system on the backend for a company to be able to do one of the greatest functions you can do as a property manager, which is market a vacant unit for a client. It’s been extremely important to have people understand how it’s done. When somebody’s out of the office another person can easily step up and do it. It’s just a very simplistic system and effective for people to utilize.
Do you have any advice for someone just entering the property management field?
MM: First of all, it’s a very exciting field. Nobody dies of boredom in property management. The fact that you get to deal with people in myriad ways really shows the human condition. As such, you get to see a whole wide range of people’s thoughts and actions that will keep you up not just at night, but also thrill and entertain you for years to come. So it is a very engaging field. As sometimes we jokingly say, with this much humor and fun that we have in the office based on what some people do as renters or owners, it’s hard to imagine that we actually get paid for it. It’s like being entertained endlessly. And I don’t mean that in a glib way, it is really a kind of funny and engaging field.
It’s also extremely important that people develop the right systems quickly and effectively. And one of the best ways to do that is through NARPM®. There’s no greater organization that would help a person do that than NARPM®. It is important for a new property manager to join an organization that understands the technical expertise and the huge areas of liabilities that we’re being exposed to. Anything from insurance requirements that changes constantly, to just understanding that even if you’re right in the actions that you take, you have a high probability of running into trouble with people who can sit at their computers and ruin your image and brand through no fault of your own. So you need to have a very high level of competency, and even then, just realize that you’re probably going to have to deal with all kinds of issues.
Another piece of advice is to have good support people, including good vendors. Vendors that not just do maintenance, but also companies like HERO PM and the accounting software companies that provide you the necessary support so that you can focus on being more effective and doing your job.