Michael Hodges is the President of First Place Management, Inc. in Jacksonville, FL, which he purchased in 2005. He has held a real estate license in the state of Florida since October 1988, and has worked in property management since 1990.

Michael is active in the National Association of Realtors, Florida Association of Realtors, Northeast Florida Association of Realtors, National Association of Residential Property Managers, Florida Association of Residential Property Managers and the Northeast Florida Association of Residential Property Managers.  He serves on several committees and chairs of FARPM. He is also involved in the Chamber of Commerce and BNI. Michael is an avid enthusiast of the University Miami football program and likes to travel with his wife Melanie, who along with his duaghter Shelby, are foodie and wine connoisseurs.

 

How did you get into property management?

MH: It happened kind of by luck. I was the Director of Reimbursement for a hospital and worked in the insurance industry, and I became interested in investment property through a friend of mine. So I ended up buying my first investment property from a particular real estate broker, who actually in the end got me involved in property management. I acquired my license since I was doing investing, and put a part time license in with this broker and did that for a while. Then, after June 1990, I opened up my first brokerage office. It was called Secured Property Services. I knew nothing about property management; I just figured I could do the job better than somebody else on my own property. So I started learning what to do and how to do it, joined NARPM, and the rest has been history.

 

You purchased First Place Property Management, Inc. in 2005, and grew it from 112 accounts to over 400. How did you accomplish this growth?

MH: I sold my first business after ten years to Prudential Network Realty in Jacksonville, and went to work for them. Then I left them and went to work for a larger firm. I basically decided that I could do a lot of the work on my own. I’m more of an entrepreneurial spirit, and I like to be able to change things rapidly. So in January 2005, I said let’s work out a deal, and I ended up buying the remaining 112 of my old Prudential accounts. One of the first things I did as we grew was to start marketing. It was mainly what I call network marketing. Because we don’t do sales, we were able to market to the realtors in the area. And I was a very big participant in the realtor association. The other thing I did was business network international marketing. And I had HERO PM doing all my marketing of my properties for rent. My strategy was to be everywhere and in as many places at once. So we were not only on HERO PM, we were also on RentClicks, FloridaRentalAds, Realtor.com and other places. All the networking and advertising put us out there, and we just started growing by leaps and bounds, and doubling up really quickly.

 

The topic of this newsletter is “Creating a High Efficiency Rental Office with the RP Management system”. What HERO PM tools do you use in your business to help you be efficient?

MH: One of the things HERO PM helps us with is to efficiently manage our rental ads. HERO has built their relationship with other paid advertisers, so we’re able to put our ads in one place. This saves labor time by having HERO put the listings in all the different sites. We also work with PROMAS and HERO PM to do Internet Publishing of our statements, so that any owner, wherever they’re at, whether they’re in China or India, can go online to view their documents. At the same time, with that system, we’re able to have everything scanned into PROMAS and we can upload and do all kinds of things. We can also do email blasts of certain information that we need to get out to our clients. We also do online applications. We try to have one source or one area we can go to where we can manage everything so that we don’t have all these different operations going on. This gives us more efficiency, and gives us a time savings, which is a big deal. One of the things I look at is whether I can save a few seconds; when you talk about seconds you think it’s not a lot of time, but when you multiply that over days of work, and over weeks and months, that’s a lot of time that we’re saving.

One of the things that we’re looking into right now is the Virtual Board that HERO PM offers. We’re looking at the Virtual Board to see if we can use this system with our move-ins and move-outs, applications and all that kind of stuff. So we’re in the process of reviewing it and seeing if we can utilize this tool.

 

Do you have any advice for someone just entering the property management field?

MH: My advice to anybody entering the property management field is to get involved and get educated. If you don’t get the education, you don’t have the knowledge, and you don’t become the expert. You can get the knowledge through various tools like PROMAS and HERO PM, and they have webinars that will help with learning their tools. The other side is to join an association such as National Association of Residential Property Managers. Those are the biggest tools right there. Using all those tools and education will help you manage your time, and feel like you’re on top.