How Educational Content Fueled a 1,400-Door Property Management Company | Mark Ainley

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Transcript

Stephen Fox
Mark, thanks so much for joining me today to start things off. Can you tell everybody a little bit about your background, your experience and how you got into property management?

Mark Ainley
Yeah, for sure. I didn't know it was on property management. I probably had a couple hundred doors. But ultimately we started out in 2003 as wanting to be a brokerage, actually wanted to be a commercial brokerage even more specifically. And then it was just really easy to make money on the residential broker side leading up to the crash. And so we focused a lot more on that. But what we were selling a lot of too was investors. I could go to you, Stephen, and say, hey, man, I get you a property. I got my mortgage guy over here.

He could get you if he likes to go fog him here. We'll get you a loan. And so we did a lot of that. And we made a lot of people a lot of money. We got a lot of people in properties. But a lot of them were always asking for management. And we fought it for a long time. One of my first investments I ever made, had a horrible experience, had a victim, did everything wrong in the book. So it kind of me down that path of like, I don't want to do management. I'll just sell people these problems. That was kind of my mindset early on. But 2000, not too long after we started, 2006, we started.

Taking on third party management. But it was always a means to an end at that point. Was, all right, well, if I manage your property 50 bucks a month, then that goes towards electric. If I manage your property for $100 a month, we can get a water cooler now. It was always really just a means to the end of a little cash on the side that covers some overhead. Ultimately, market crashed. We started investing. And we were still selling some properties to investors. And also, we got about 250 doors.

My partner came in one day and we were hiring people here, kind of here and there, people we knew. And he's like, man, everything's kind of chaotic. Everyone, you know, this person's complaining about this. This person's saying this a mess. And I'm like, man, we have, we managed 250 doors and a half million square feet of commercial space and we don't have a process. So I'm like, we're sort of a property management company. And then, you know, a of weeks later, I Googled, property management in the town we were in. And the only property management company that came up in that co in that town was.

Another agent in my office that I didn't realize was doing property management on the side. So I'm like, man, you know, we've gotten this big and we never, you know, to your, your existence, we never even did any marketing yet. And I really think it's easy. You hear a lot of people say, you know, I don't do any marketing and they're under 250, 300 doors and it's, really easy to get a 2030 referrals a year and continue to grow that clip. But once you kind of get past that, it becomes a necessary, it was kind of a side note there, but yeah, that's ultimately we.

Mark Ainley
We really started focusing on property management in 2014. Really started going deeper when we got involved in NARPM in 2017. And here we are, 2026, about 1450 doors today, a million square feet of commercial space, and we're enjoying it.

Stephen Fox
Got it. So from what it sounds like the first 250 doors or so was really just through your network, people you knew from being in the real estate industry. I guess at what point did you realize that marketing and education would be a core growth lever for your business and not just, let's say a nice to have.

Mark Ainley
Um, well, sort of, uh, on accident and on purpose, but, you know, in 2018, 19, there's a lot of talk around, um, departmentalizing sales and marketing, right? It was up until that point, it was me taking a, uh, a call from an owner between showing a property and, uh, and, uh, and, and dispatching a work order. So it was always kind of just a in between thing. In 2018, when we really got serious 18, 19, um, my partner's base said, all right. Um,

You so leading up to that, know, operations always, you know, I did a lot in the operation side and when things started smooth out, we actually started to have a, uh, you know, all the process in place and all that stuff. My partner's kind of took the tone of like, all right, you got to get out of operations because you're actually the problem now. And, uh, he's like, you put it, was like, I solved this problem. I saw this problem. Yeah, you solved that, but you set three more fires on the way to try to solve that with the team and the team's best. And I'm like, all right, so they're like, you go, go figure out sales and marketing. So.

They sent me over sales and marketing and they sent me to create sales and marketing and really what that, you know, that kind of created anxiety at first. I'm like, man, like now I have to do this. Now I have to have numbers, KPIs. I have to actually show up at the meetings and like explain my existence and so forth. So, but I never really liked the sales thing. And even with real estate sales, it was truly the brokering idea. Like, all right, well, man, I got this great opportunity here and you're looking to do this in your financial goals.

That's matched these two up, a true definition of a real estate broker. But with property management, after 2008 to 2018, we did a lot of investing ourselves. We did, we did, we did a strategy of 482 properties and we messed up so much. I always said that, I still say we made a million or a thousand thousand dollar mistakes. So a million bucks in mistakes. And I had so much of that value to give. And I found myself when I started the sales journey,

You know, I get on the call with an investor, like, no, no, no, you can't do that. You got to do this because so I started like all of sudden one-on-one educating all these people and that got business. This naturally you help somebody. They return feel obligated to, to, to hire you. And, that, turned into the, maybe I keep repeating the same thing. Maybe I should put this to do an ebook or I keep repeating the same thing. Maybe I should have a conference or a small mini conference on this, or, then ultimately turn it to the podcast. It's like, all right, I can only talk to 20, 30 people a week.

Mark Ainley
If we do a podcast, maybe we can reach a couple hundred. So yeah, that's kind of the long answer to your short question.

Stephen Fox
Okay, and I guess when you started, it doesn't sound like you really had a marketing background. And for anyone that's watching, GCU Realty has probably one of the best marketing strategies that we've seen from a local property management company. So just hats off to you, Mark, because from what you're saying, it sounds like in 2018, you kind of were like, well...

Mark Ainley
Thank you.

Stephen Fox
My partners don't really want me in operations. They want me to focus on marketing the business. I'm have to go and figure this out. I guess looking back, what marketing did you try or what positioning mistakes did you make that if you had to go back and do it, like you would avoid those.

Mark Ainley
Well, when I look at the journey, I was very discouraged at first of, right, I could go spend X amount of dollars and then actually maybe get nothing from it. Or I should, in order to make sure I'm even, this even works, I should spend a whole bunch more money than the X amount of dollars I'm comfortable spending to do a true test to see if it even works. So it's like, that really, that really got me on so many different levels. You know, there's so many times, you know, there's a big talk about radio at some point and flyers and, so you went, I went down this route of like almost

Clicking, let's go on all these different things so many different times. And that was, I don't know, that discouraged me early on in the market side. Like you could try a whole bunch of new things and even the free stuff too, right? I could go send a million emails and I might not get anything from it. But I think my original train of thought was that is so discouraging, but now it's shifting to like, this is fun and this experiment. Now I've still, and I think it's more fun now because I think there's so much digitally.

That you could do that's not crazy expensive, uh, that you could test out or do for six months or a year or committed something for a year and half, whatever it might be. And, uh, know, at the end of the day, even if you still do get a handful of clients out of that, the, cack isn't crazy here your cost of acquisition of a client. Like, so the ability to experiment with digital as, as kind of made it so much more, uh, fun versus all the kind of paper, billboard, radio, all that type of stuff that, uh, it was kind of fading out as I was getting into marketing.

So that's kind of where my mindset's changed of like, this is the, it used to be, this is the fear of like, this is a waste to now it's the opportunity because other people aren't trying it. Right. So if I try, so a lot of what I've been driven by, you know, creating video, you know, doing different campaigns or, know, putting together, know, different lists for investors that I can then, use as a lead magnet, like all of that, my motivation has been, all right, no one else is doing it. So I want to do it before someone else does it.

Because then they won't do it because I'm already doing it so a lot of you know, it's a video I was saying in 2020 or 2020 You know, got to get out if you do video right now It's it's your kind of competitive advantage because no one's gonna be doing it two years or everyone's gonna be doing two years But that's still the case right now. It's still the competitive advantage. I won't say any market There's probably only one or two people that are really the face of property management in that city So it's such a huge competitive advantage

Stephen Fox
Yeah, it's wild. The level of competition from a marketing standpoint and property management is just so low because most people don't want to do it. And what ends up happening is just, as you said, you're in a pretty big market. You're in Chicago. It's not a small town.

And as you said, there's maybe one or two other companies that are doing it. Right? So the fact that you're willing to get out there and actually put your face in front of the camera, record podcasts like that at this point has set you heads and tails above all of your competitors. So you do produce a lot of content, YouTube, podcasts, blog posts. From what I understand you do live speeches as well. How do you decide what content to create?

Channels to prioritize like how did you figure out where to roll out and I guess to date what's worked best what's been worth the time

Mark Ainley
I still don't have it figured out 100%, but it's always the testing of it. But what I like right now, so I only started listening to Gary Vee about a year ago. And he's a maniac. But the main thing I've taken away from him is that you could promote, everything's free. So everything you listed out, all those different sources, even when you start getting into like Medium and all these other different websites, Substack, all that.

Everything's free. So the ability to take things to play now now where I was kind of where you get overwhelmed is like, I have all these different places like what how do I even create that much content. I think what we've been trying to do this last year is take a piece of content and you know, might be a podcast episode, or it might be a article and I think I've tried to up my game as far as keeping things interesting.

You can only put so many three things you should look out for when leasing a property in Chicago. You can only put so much of that content out there. So trying to keep it more interesting. When I say more interesting, what I've been doing is taking our data. The 400 units we leased last year, and here's our numbers of how long it took us, how many times we dropped the price. So just trying to create some more interesting stuff. But what we'll do is we'll take that article, try to write it well with the data, and try to make it interesting.

We all know that thumbnail that that's the that's 80 % of it getting that thumbnail so people actually want to see it but we'll take that then and then we will put that into the the drip that I created for lead simple and we'll talk about drips here a second and then the drip that we create the drip that it goes at least somebody goes they call it 4,000 people that have raised their hand and have some sort of interest in our what we do in the last five six years we'll put the drip into our email blast that we said to a male chimp which

Mark Ainley
Is a list that we talk about building lists to. It's about 50,000 people right now. And then we take that article and we spin it and put something, you know, change up the write up and to put into LinkedIn. Then you drive every, and the goal in all this is drive people back to our website. And then, you know, some of the long form stuff, I don't necessarily do too much of the driving back to the website and a lot of like the Instagram, you know, TikTok, you know.

And we have multiple different counts between the podcast and all that stuff. A lot of that stuff is more of just kind of quick hit. You know, I'm not trying to really drive too many people back. Maybe they'll find the podcast or something like that, but I don't have high, that's more of exposure than it is. I'm trying to get conversion, I guess.

Stephen Fox
Yeah. So one thing that I've noticed from talking to a lot of property management companies is there's kind of confusion between email marketing versus Lead Simple. Can you kind of differentiate what the difference is? Cause you mentioned you have 50,000 people on Mailchimp that you're sending out regular emails to and then you also have your drip campaign on Lead Simple. How do you use each one?

Mark Ainley
Yeah. So Lead Simple, these people, if they're in your lead simple, they've raised their hand and said, I'm somewhat interested in what you do. So it's, not, maybe, maybe 20 % of you never talked to, 20 % are just kind of kicking tires. Another large chunk might have a property and they're self-managing. Another large chunk might be truly serious about investing or in the process of it. And, you know, we've built out, you know, every, everyone that comes in our system really falls into five categories. Make sure I get these right.

They're, self-managing. They're with another property manager. They are, looking to buy a property. They're looking to move out and rent, or maybe they just downloaded a lead magnet. And I'm not sure how the hell, what the hell, cause I never could get ahold of them. And then we have a six one never able to get ahold of that's more generic, but all, all, all six of those in lead simple will update every year with every seven days, some sort of messaging. Now a lot of that messaging ties back to.

The quick little summary directing them back to our website to a lot of the least simple traffic We really want to get our website to get them back remembering who we are why they're on our website and doing that But again, it's a lot of that we're tying back that same content And keep them up there, but it's specific to what they're doing. So the looking to move on rent It's about hey, you should refinance as an owner occupied before you go to before you move out now it's much harder to get financing or

Hey, you know, if you're getting your place ready, keep these things in mind. This is what renters are looking for in the Chicago market. Now, the person that's looking to buy it's like, hey, you know, our podcast is a great resource. Here's four episodes that talk about house hacking in Chicago or here's here's our top three lenders that we have that and here's some clips on it. So we try to gear those towards it. So LeaseSimple is a lot more direct. Now they get through that first year or whatever. We'll update the content and all that. But at Mailchimp then.

It's more of like, I gotta get these people to engage. Literally call the campaign, get people to engage. And that's, I'm sure you're familiar with them, but anyone else out there, know, Neil Patel, Neil Patel is, one of the biggest marketers out there. And, know, he doesn't necessarily service, companies, our size, but, he has, he, really opened my eyes to, I used to send out a MailChimp like once every two weeks and I'm like, I don't want to annoy people. Right. And,

Mark Ainley
Now, like I set up Neil Patel, it's like, man, he sends me shit every single day, Monday to Sunday, like, and the thing is, like, this stuff's interesting. So one, it makes me want to look at it. But two, the people that that does annoy, they probably are going to subscribe and never gonna hire me anyway. So I really don't care. The people that I do want to hire me are probably interested in this content and curious about what I'm thinking or where are what our company is thinking. So

I think for the MailChimp thing we shifted this past year, so we're setting out three times a week, a kind of short thing, but it's always driving people back to our website again. And then one of those MailChimp a week is promoting the new podcast episode that came out. Again, we'll put a couple other kind of resources in that promotion.

Stephen Fox
And the people that are subscribed to you on MailChimp, how did they come to be versus the people in Lead Simple or is it once they go through a year of Lead Simple they automatically send it to MailChimp? How does that work for you?

Mark Ainley
It's both. So the people that go to our LeaseSimple do end up in a MailChimp. So they do get kind of double-touched. Getting every five, six days in LeaseSimple and then they get three times a week. So they're getting hit pretty hard there. And then we, you know, in Chicago, we have 25, 30,000 realtors. That's another big chunk of that list that a long time, about five, six years ago, I literally paid my kids five cents in email to pull it out from the MLS one at a time. So it needs to be updated somewhat, but you know,

We've I've worked with a couple of lenders, a couple of their kind of guys might not work like, hey man, let's swap lists. So they're very hyper Chicago investor lists that we have. Then and then people subscribe then as well to sign up for the newsletter. We have different things that we're always trying to sign up for more information. So and that adds them to the list as well. So that's what makes up that 50 60. Now, the one thing I realized in the last year was there's people that have not.

Even open an email in six years and that hurts my MailChimp thing. So we learned some of that around like, hey, get rid of some of old stuff. It's not about having so many emails, it's about who's actually engaging. So we learned a lot about that this past year.

Stephen Fox
For those that don't understand that, what happens is it impacts your deliverability rate, right? So if you have a ton of people that never open emails, it kind of flags it almost as like this might be a lower quality email. So that's why you always want to, basically you call it cleaning up your email list. So a lot of property management companies out there are hesitant or scared of investing in long form content because it feels slow, right? It's not like a paper lead where you pay money and the next day you get a

I guess how long did it take you before you started to see a real business impact?

Mark Ainley
So I think it came, it came before on the SEO side, more so than it did the, Hey, I liked your article. I want to talk more side. And that has been huge for us on the SEO side, just generating those leads. And you know, one of the things that early on about some of the marketers, like it's really hard to trace it back to the hardcore source. It's like, I found you online. It's like, Oh, well, which site? I found you on Google. It's like, Oh, well, it's like, what made you go to Google to like, so.

Uh, all those type of things, but, uh, the SEO side has been huge, especially, uh, one of our, um, this is our own challenges. You know, we promote Chicago property manager, but we are 30 minutes outside the city. So if we're talking about the, uh, the trifecta on Google and tying back to where you're at in the map, like we're way out there. So we have even more of a challenge to, to solidify ourselves as a Chicago property manager. Now we got to play stuff out in the suburbs and you know, we're one, you know, have a hundred, 282 suburbs here in Chicago that.

We're always trying to rank up high. Those are pretty easy compared to we're always trying to compete for 1 through 7 in the Chicago side.

Stephen Fox
Yeah. Yeah. And what you're able to do, to be honest, was solely because you built a brand. Because one thing that heavily impacts SEO is how many brand name searches this company have.

And if you think of it logically, if a company has a lot of brand name searches, it must be a pretty big company. Google's smart enough to figure that out. And as a result, you were able to pull off something that most property management companies would not be able to because of the fact that you built a brand. So I guess, can you walk us through a little bit, once a lead comes in, what happens next? Walk us through your sales process. It, you know, they call in, you give them your pricing, and then if they sign up, great. Or is it a little bit more in-depth than that?

Mark Ainley
We're big on speed to lead when we can make it happen. So I have a BDM He's newer. I've only had two BDM since so I said that BDM role full disclosure up until 22 and then I found somebody actually they found me through the podcast and success story and he actually got promoted to director of property manager So it's total success story

Stephen Fox
What size were you when you decided to finally move out of the sales role?

Mark Ainley
We were, we're probably about a thousand doors, 1100 doors. We're, fairly, good size at that point. But that was kind of like the bait of my existence. Think some of the, the only, like only I could do this moment, I was having to in that. And I was, I really enjoyed the medium role as well too. So, but I really looked at capacity is like, all right, we're probably, we could probably, if we could continue, if I could put some more time on the marketing side.

I could probably get us to where we need about a BDM and a half, which means this person can come in and that could help kind of be that half when needed. So that was kind of how I got myself out of that. But we have a newer guy in there right now and we always talk about speed to lead and you definitely see the difference when, especially if you're getting some of these paper leads, thumb tack or APM leads, stuff like that. If you can't call within the first half hour, you're not going to get it.

But that being said, you know, we have everything in Lead Simple where, you know, bam, they go into Lead Simple, they get a video welcome, and then they get a couple of quick text messages as well, too. But then our goal is always to direct them back to the calendar link to schedule a time. And we have about a 35 % calendar hit rate, which is pretty good. We're up from about 23 % a few years ago. But our goal is to get them on a call. And if they don't schedule a call right away, we're trying to call them right away.

Stephen Fox
There a reason you don't make that, you don't allow them to schedule a call right when they're reaching out to you? So for example, they fill out the form, then they're redirected to a Calendly page to book a call.

Mark Ainley
They do. That's there too. So that is a page. So yep. We have that for all of our lead magnets who's like, are you sure you don't want to schedule a call right now? So yep, for sure.

Stephen Fox
Yeah, I think one thing that I've seen hands down be the most popular way to grow or the most successful way to grow is the owner handle sales till about a thousand doors, make 800 but close to that mark. And then at that point it makes sense to bring on a BDM. And it's like nine out of 10 companies that we work with that have scaled past a thousand doors have followed that exact strategy.

I think one thing that a lot of companies miss on is hiring a BDM when you have 200 doors. Look, if you really can't do sales is one thing, but you need leads for a successful salesperson, right? If you're hiring a salesperson and you're expecting them to go out there and generate all their leads and do all of the sales, you're not utilizing them to their full potential. If you have the leads to feed them and all that salesperson can do is sell, that produces the best results because the best salesperson

That sale people want to work in that type of environment where all day they can be selling, not prospecting. So it sounds like you kind of followed a similar journey.

Mark Ainley
I can't agree with you more on that. There's been a lot of talk as leads have slowed down here in the past call it 18 months of like, go do outbound. Because I really think an outbound salesperson and inbound salesperson are really two different people in a way as well too. I think the number, to your point, your number one thing is to get enough leads so you can hire an inbound guy that only handles your amount. Think about this. You could go send your guy out to a networking event.

For me, it took me years to build up rapport with a group or a group of people or a networking group or individuals to start. I had set up so much business for them to start sending me business like years and the lifespan of a BDM, I think in our industry, think if I recall, it was like 18 months. So by the time that guy even gets cranking, like he's gone and then they're calling him when he's at his next job already.

Stephen Fox
Yeah, exactly. And if they have to wait 18 months till they can finally start to get some leads coming in, they're gone.

Mark Ainley
Yeah, they're going to get discouraged too and they're going to be upset faster. So that's not good either.

Stephen Fox
Yeah, 100%. So I guess from your experience, what marketing tactics do you think property management companies over rely on or overestimate?

Mark Ainley
I think the...

Well, I guess I can answer that in the reverse of they underestimate the SEO side of things. They over, I think they, you know, when you start growing indoors, you know, no matter what you're to have, call it 10, you know, some people have lower, but I mean, really you're going to be, have that 10 to 20 % churn. So as you get more doors, you have to offset those doors just to break even, right? It's just a math problem.

And the ability to continue your referrals and get that in through your network ends up two reasons. One, you have to keep up pace, right? If you got 20 referrals, one year, now you need 40 just to keep up because you grew a hundred doors last year. And then also as the operator of the business, you're networking less because now you're stuck in the business. So which means your, your referral sources are those that rapport you have with your community is going down a little as well too. So

Getting out ahead of that faster. But that SEO is that slow bake. Getting that stuff on there. And when we say SEO, it's a very general thing, right? But it's like taking your website and not making it a brochure and having it be a little more interactive and having a video. We try to put a video on every single page. And it's two, three minute videos. It's super easy. And we can talk about some of the things that I've gotten over as far as doing videos faster. But...

But just optimizing that and then the content you're putting on there for the keywords. It's just so easy these days to create content. And even if you're going to have some sort of AI created and you go through and clean it up 30%, I think that's still valuable SEO content.

Stephen Fox
So what are some tactics that you use to create videos faster? Because I know a lot of people are hesitant to do that. I imagine when you first started, probably took you four times the amount of time as it does now. Do you have any tips for anyone?

Mark Ainley
Yeah. So don't edit them, make them short. And you know, don't, you know, that people like, this guy's got to edit this video. I got sent it off. Two things, one, you know, I bought, I bought this little remote thing that you can put your iPhone on the stand and then you can hit this to hit, hit start recording and stop recording. So now I don't have to cut out the beginning or the end of me leaning forward to hit the stop button on my phone. So that's something, so I can take that video from my phone and go right to LinkedIn with that. I don't have to do any editing on it. So.

That's been huge for us and you can do the same thing you turn your phone sideways for your Instagram reels or whatever and I think people over They worry too much about the editing side of things, you know When you say the word dollars in your in your Instagram video and a dollar sign flows up from above your head Like no one cares about that. They really like it doesn't have to look that sexy. So people here overall people care far less than you think And it's taking me, you I turned 45 tomorrow. So I was thinking about some things that

25 verse 45 year old Mark is thinking. And that was one of the things like I used to be very worried about what other people think. And now I have 45. It's like people just don't care if you have a good message or you have a good or very exciting or if you have something that entertains them like they don't care what you're you're if you're if you have a pause you have an up for whatever. And that actually makes it more real. Right. And this day of A. I. If you have a buffer you say a word wrong and you actually make fun yourself in the video.

Like those things are okay. So don't worry about the 10 takes and having to send it to your guy that took you three months on a upwork to find to do it. Just record it and post it. And that's the thing I like. You may talk about recording lives a little while ago. That's the other thing too. I teamed up with, here's a kind of a cool little hack you someone could do too is there's another property manager in my market that he really does almost the opposite.

Things that he does in the areas, C and D class more neighborhoods. Don't really go into, and he doesn't really go into the areas I'm in out here in the burbs and stuff like that. So every Thursday we get together and I say every, but we run, we're going four in a row. Our goal is to keep going for the year here. We nicknamed it Chicago landlord secrets. And we get on for 40 minutes and we're, we're live on YouTube, Facebook and, and, LinkedIn. And then we're able to create articles from that and maybe some clips from that. But again, I, I.

Mark Ainley
All I need to do is really set up the invite. It's set up the StreamYard. We talked about that a little, and if anyone has any questions about how to set that up, it's really easy. It's just $10 subscription and connect your socials to it.

Stephen Fox
You mentioned earlier that you don't necessarily have perfect tracking. You don't know where every single lead came from.

What was it that made you go, okay, I don't know where every single lead is coming from, but I'm gonna just keep at it. Because a lot of people, when they can't make that direct correlation right away, they give up. And usually what happens, especially when you're in the, I'll call it the content game, when you're producing content consistently, is it takes time to build up. And a lot of people probably give up before they get to a point where it's gonna start to make a benefit. So I guess for you, what is it that allowed you to continue even though you couldn't directly correlate?

Okay, our leaf flow is gone up because we're doing this podcast or whatever it might be

Mark Ainley
Yeah, I think it comes down to tracking your CAC, your client acquisition costs. And at end of the year, if you know, our goal is always to be right around 1100. You know, I'm going to do these efforts here. I'm going to do these efforts here. I'm getting some feedback here. Can't nest, you know, if someone downloads a web for an ebook from your website, it's like, ah, like you're on my website. I don't know how you got to the website though. So that, that used to be discouraging. Now it's just like, I'm grateful that guy's in the system. And now I have these other ways that I can market this guy and maybe I'll get him to the table.

To gauge. Really tracing it back to our average number of costs on an annual basis really what kind of keeps me in the feeling good about it.

Stephen Fox
Clinic position.

Stephen Fox
So is it every year you reevaluate all the marketing strategies and let's say you've implemented a new strategy for 2026 at the end of 2026, you'll go and you'll look at your client acquisition costs and be like, has it decreased or increased?

Mark Ainley
Yeah. So we really checked out on a monthly basis, call it Rolling 12. But we, you know, for example, I think it two, three years ago, we like, let's go hard on Facebook ads. And a lot of it was around, you know, listen too much to Alex from Hozy and how he does stuff on there. And I'm like, let's just go hard. It's like spend like 2000 a week. Like, so we did that for about five months and we're like, we got, we clearly got nothing from this. Like I actually lead volumes gone down, like.

And so we shifted right away and then we did some things. That really got us into like, all right, now we got to balance out our CAC for the year because we spent all that money and didn't get anything from it. So that really got us into like, all right, let's put the labor into creating more content and doing some this back to the low hanging fruit of cleaning up the website and stuff.

Stephen Fox
Yeah, so property management is kind of a unique industry and from what we've seen, generally paid ads are not the best way to really scale a property management company. The cost of acquisition is quite high. Have you had success with paid ads or has it really all been through organic content?

Mark Ainley
So we had to be doing Google AdWords for awhile and we weren't, we weren't, I wasn't able to trace any of that. So if you really, when I was able to look at the, whatever the UAC or where it's coming from, I was able to trace very little back to the, the $4,000 we're spending a month and we're doing that for, for years. And it was more, again, it's like, we we had to have that presence. We saw it up there, but we weren't sure a hundred percent, but

Then we switched that to another person that was handling it more of a third party where they built their own landing page for us. They were just charging us per lead. And we've seen great activity from that. But again, that CAC is higher. I think our CAC for our Google Ads ends up being about 23, 2,400 a person, which I'm fine with because there's a whole bunch of other lower things.

That was kind of a, then you have the, the, the APM leads and stuff like that. And those, those just end up, I think the question on getting all property management leads and those ones you pay for is like, can you get a couple and is all the time you spent chasing the ones that sucked or the ones that weren't valid worth your time? And that's what you have to justify, I guess. But yeah, so majority of it has been when you look at our,

We, now we just started doing a kind of marketing plan, I think in 2021. And I took it from the, I've shared this before with the management community, was a one page marketing plan. And that's how we've, we created a marketing plan. We do that every year. And, but again, a lot, when you look at our marketing plan ends up being a lot more labor than, than anything of trying to get this done. And to speak to the labor, you know, I don't have a huge force. It's literally myself.

Which I would say I spend about 30, if you're, if the time of creating content and podcasts and all that stuff, call it half my time is, is in marketing. And then I have a full time, remote team member, they spent with three or four years that he's just pretty, he's pretty good. So,

Stephen Fox
So you mentioned right now, from what it sounds like, the ads you do run, it's the highest cap. So for anyone that's watching, doesn't understand what cap is, it's client acquisition cost. You said 2,300 you're fine with, which is quite expensive, but I understand why you're saying you're fine with it. But I just want you to explain to everybody why you're okay with it. How do you determine what client acquisition cost is acceptable?

Mark Ainley
Yeah, so you can look at client acquisition costs in the sense of how much it costs you to get that client. And one client might cost $2,300. But if I have other clients that, you know, it was a referral, obviously, referral is free, right? I mean, sure, you could really compound the time we have put into a relationship, all that stuff. You're not, there's no spend on that. So it's zero or 200 bucks, whatever you want, you maybe paid a referral fee or whatever, 250.

Um, I think it's just a lot of averages, um, back to the, if, long as we're tracking our CAC on an annual basis and we're, around that $1,100 mark, then, uh, you know, there's just, there's always gonna be things that are gonna be more expensive. Um, and that's how we have to, uh, kind of go about trying to, we test things and how much we're willing to spend to get somebody. I mean, in the end of the day, if you told me today, um, I have this awesome client and, you know, he's got this property and it's got a high, high RPU, obviously a higher quality.

And it was going to cost you three grand. I'd probably say, yeah, we'll figure it out. Let's do it. Yeah. So.

Stephen Fox
I imagine that's because you know the client lifetime value is much higher than that.

Mark Ainley
Yes, exactly. You know, understanding your client lifetime value is another big proponent of this. So we, right now, I believe we're at about six and a half years as far as average client. And we also have maintenance too. So we have not only the RPU side of things for the property management, but we also get a, you it's probably ends up being, you add another 80 to a hundred RPUs just for the maintenance side of things, if not more than that, maybe even little more when you start accounting for turnovers and all that.

Stephen Fox
Makes sense. So what you always want to do is basically compare your client lifetime value with the client acquisition cost. If your client lifetime value is 15 grand and you're spending $3,000 to acquire that client, you're still going end up with a 5X return. Is there a certain CAC to client lifetime value ratio that you look for that is acceptable?

Mark Ainley
I don't know exactly how to answer that. But the one thing that really makes our CAC even super more valuable is onboarding 50 % of our properties vacant, where we get that, that lease up and we're fortunate here in the Chicago market, you get a full month's rent for leasing a place up. So a lot of times, you know, might have a three or $4,000 place and, you're able to lease it up in the first 90 days, which man more than covers your, your, your CAC. So

I think one of the things we watch for is making sure that that balance of vacant versus not vacant is pretty close.

Stephen Fox
Sense. So if you were going back in time to when you started your journey in property management, you started GC Realty again today, what is the one thing you would change from a marketing and sales standpoint that you think would help your company succeed at a faster pace?

Mark Ainley
Just, I think any, I could answer the same answer anywhere in my life more faster. Here's the thing. Just talking to a lot of property managers, it's really now I'm fortunate that as an owner operator, I have the time and the partners to work in this side of things. So those of you listening, like, that's not fair. I don't got time. I don't have that guy. Like it's true that I do have that advantage, but, I think I've, I've, I've wasted a lot of years.

Just not doing more and getting more out there. And just there's always opportunity to more marketing and you probably can never have enough out there and having just putting more time into it. Some years I would get sucked in back in operations thinking I go solve a problem over there. But then a day, a lot of the operations problem gets solved with growth. And if you start growing and you start having losing clients, like all of sudden you'll fix those problems.

So I think a lot of what, if you focus more on the marketing sales side of things, that will eventually force you to solve your operations issues faster.

Stephen Fox
Makes sense. Awesome. Mark, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it. For anyone that wants to connect with you, what would be the best place for them to reach out?

Mark Ainley
Yeah, so I'm out there on Crane. I'm out there on LinkedIn, you know, my Instagram, @Mark AileyREI, check out our, our website, GCrealtyinc.com. Our podcast website straightupChicagoinvestor.com

Stephen Fox
Thanks so much, Mark.

Mark Ainley
I appreciate it.