Conrad Vass, a property manager since 1992, explains why premium tenants prefer inner-city locations over suburbs. Inner-city buildings demand specialist contractors and deep council knowledge, while tenants expect advisory relationships, not just housing. The trade-off: higher complexity and responsibility, but better-quality occupants.
Chapters
What does location matter by way of how you approach your services? That's a good question. One of the best examples I can give of that is I've been pretty fortunate in which most of my career has been Focused in the area of the city fringe, uh, Darlinghurst and Surry Hills predominantly. Not to say not having experience in other areas, inner west and so on, and areas change, but I've been doing this a long time. I, I started in the industry in 1992, um, in the inner west. The demographic, the circumstances, the legislation—different. Time has gone on, but people are people, and certain areas have certain demographics, and there's certain behaviors, and there's certain cultural differences that do play into a property manager's day-to-day role. I remember, and again, we go back to very early days of 1992-93. When we were studying, and there was a case study in one of our subjects in which— I think it was in the Blacktown area at the time— um, the property manager was investigating an odor complaint. Long story short, they'd found that the tenants were keeping goats and chickens, from memory, in the roof space. They didn't see anything wrong with it. It was perfectly normal to live with animals from where these particular tenants had migrated from. But that profile of migrant at that time was pretty typical for that area, and so the story went. The story was pretty extreme, but it sort of demonstrated a point that certain areas require a different skill set and experience to understand and avoid. So it may be a linguistic one, there might be, you know, if an area, for example, the Canterbury Bankstown area, that's very strong in the, you know, if Arabic is one of your languages, that is a really strong advantage so you don't get things lost in translation, for example. But yeah, I mean, working in the inner city, things have changed. I mean, it's been a long time. Typically, your tenants through those sorts of areas have a different expectation level, as do the property owners. So dealing with areas, as I've said in an earlier clip, you're dealing with buildings that are as old as Sydney. You're dealing with the latest, the most contemporary of constructions, uh, and everything in between. So if you don't understand what that is, then it does make life very difficult and it does create frustration. So experience is important, knowledge is important, understanding the, the nuances of, of, of the assets that you're dealing with, let alone the people whom are using those assets, whether they, they be as their home or whether they be for their business or both. So, you know, you, you may be dealing with a more sophisticated tenant, uh, rather than the blue, you know, that works as a high-end professional as opposed to a blue-collar worker in the main. Not that it makes much of a difference in my view, uh, people are people. And again, communication is really important. And as long as people do what they say and say what they do, most times than not, things— problems are avoided. Not to say things don't happen. You know, some people are far more demanding by nature than others. That's a people problem. Some properties are far more demanding than others, and that could be for a myriad, for a mirage of other reasons. That all said, a property manager needs to be able to grasp those and be able to go between property to property and reconcile those to provide a consistent service that is aligned with both customer and client expectations. And where they are misaligned, deal with that accordingly. Uh, you know, and again, there are different expectations for someone, for example, who's paying $1,500 for a 1-bedroom apartment as to someone who may be paying $300 for a house. So again, different markets, But nevertheless, the rules are the same. It's just how you maintain that consistency. And you've got to deal with challenges. There's building regulations, particularly in my area of the inner city. You have heritage issues that could be down to the color of the external wall. That might be a problem. There might be legacy approval issues. Uh, you know, you've got to have good network of contractors, you know, people that are, they're really good at different things. You know, they might be good with the old rickety timber windows as opposed to, uh, you know, um, very old wiring systems. Yeah, you need to have the right people for the right tasks because No 2 days are the same, rarely are 2 challenges the same. You've got to have a good understanding of councils and how they operate. There's no point arguing with them, you've got to work with them because ultimately your client will pay the price. So you have to sometimes save people from themselves as we often have. You've got to understand micro trends of an area, uh, what's happening, why it's happening. You know, you have your micro issues, you always have your macro issues, and you've got to be across those because at the end of the day we are advisors to our clients. We're not just order takers. We, we give advice, we give guidance. Someone chooses to take it or not, that's a secondary issue, but our role is that predominantly. Um, and, you know, we build relationships, um, whether it's people in the neighborhood who, you know, might give you a call or send you a text in the middle of the night because someone's doing something they shouldn't. Or, um, as was the case last weekend, we had a neighbor telling us about there was an attempted break-in and they called the police and what that all meant for the neighborhood and Etc. So these things you can't put on a piece of paper. You can't give them as a list of services, but they are what really sets apart a process and a and a service that delivers, and that often gets lost in the Excel comparisons that people may make by just calling and. Asking what's your fee, what's your price. You're not going to understand what you get for your money until you speak to the person and ask them what they do and how they do it and why do they do it different, and perhaps throw a problem at them and see how they would deal with it. I don't— I think in all my years I've had one, one prospective, uh, landlord Put to me a proposition of how I would deal with a particular prickly problem, and that was part of their process of understanding whether they were engaging the right person or whether they were just price hunting, which is often the case. But you know, cheap can be very expensive. Value, I understand.
