Peter Lohmann explains why full-time Business Development Managers cost six figures, then introduces Clozer, a service by Jen Merritt that handles owner leads on a pay-per-closed-deal basis instead. You only pay when a deal is signed.
Does your property management business get at least 10 leads per month? I'm talking rental owner leads here, not tenant leads. If so, you may have an interesting new option to grow your business. And no, this isn't something I'm selling. I don't even have an affiliate agreement with these guys. I just think it's interesting. Before we jump into that, let me tell you about how we close doors at my management company. We have an in-house salesperson who we pay a lot of money, and that person is responsible for taking all the inbound owner leads. So somebody calls up and says, I have a duplex, I need someone to take care of the property, collect the rent, deal with maintenance and all that. All of those leads go to our salesperson. We call them a BDM, business development manager. And that's great. It works really well for us. We get a lot of leads every month. We're a big company. We can afford a full-time BDM. And me as the business owner, I'm no longer interested in doing those things anyway. So it just made sense to hire a BDM. And we partner with a company called RentScale to help find, onboard, train, and manage that BDM. And RentScale has been around a long time. A friend of mine runs the company, Jeremy Pound. He's a great guy. At all the industry conferences. So for a company like mine, that works great. However, not everyone can afford a full-time BDM. BDM is expensive. You got to pay them a base salary, benefits, and then you got to pay them a commission every time they bring on a new door. So when you add it all up, usually it's going to be over 6 figures a year, depending on how effective the person is and what part of the country you live in. So that's pretty much been our only option as property management business owners. You either take all the leads yourself, which let's be honest, you don't have time to do that because you're running around putting out fires all day, every day. You don't have that speed to lead factor that's so important. Winning new owner accounts. So what can you do? Well, there's a new company called Clozer, C-L-O-Z-E-R, created by Jen Merritt, who's a partner at RentScale and a friend of mine. So this was kind of birthed out of RentScale. RentScale spoke with a lot of property management business owners who just weren't ready to make that commitment on hiring a full-time BDM, but they knew they needed help winning doors. They knew that their current setup just wasn't working anymore. So they put their heads together over there at RentScale. They came up with Clozer. What is it? Well, instead of paying per lead, you pay per closed You pay a few hundred bucks every time they close a deal for you. So instead of leads coming to you at your business, you forward them over to Closer. They have specialized trained salespeople who are used to talking with property owners all day, every day. They learn all about your business and they close your deals for you. And as soon as they get a signed property management agreement, boom, they come back over to your company for onboarding and all the property management functions after that. But Closer does the hard work of closing the deal for you. You don't have to pay unless they close the deal. So again, I have no affiliation with this business. I just think it's really interesting. And this This would have been exactly what I needed when I was a smaller company and I couldn't afford a full-time BDM yet. So I think this is a really interesting move by Closer and RentScale. And I know a couple of friends who are using this, a couple of Crane members are using it already, they— and they're saying good things. So recommend you check it out if you don't have a full-time BDM and you're not quite ready to make that hire yet, but you know you need help closing doors. Check them out.
