New property managers productive in ten weeks for a Frankfurt firm

Situation

A property management firm in Frankfurt-Sachsenhausen, 40 staff, manages around 4,000 residential and commercial units for owners and owners’ associations. It hires four to six property managers a year. New starters got a desk, a login and a portfolio on day one, and learned the rest by asking. It took about five months until a new manager ran their portfolio without daily help. Two of the last five starters had left within the probation period, one of them after a difficult owners’ meeting in week three. Each exit cost the firm a new search, a second onboarding and several irritated owners.

Approach

We worked on one role level, the property manager, because that is where the losses were. First we interviewed the three most recent starters, their two team leads and the managing partner, and asked one question: what did you need to know, and when did you find it out?

From the answers we built a 30-60-90 day programme:

• Days 1 to 30: the systems, the firm’s standard letters and the accounting process, shadowing a senior colleague at two owners’ meetings, no portfolio of their own yet. A named buddy for daily questions.
• Days 31 to 60: a starter portfolio of 300 units with the buddy as backup, and the first owners’ meeting of their own with the team lead in the room.
• Days 61 to 90: the full portfolio, the first month-end closing alone, and one difficult case reviewed with the team lead.

Each phase has a checklist for the starter and one for the team lead, plus a 30-minute checkpoint at day 30, 60 and 90 with a written note. The day-90 checkpoint doubles as the first probation-period conversation, in good time within the six-month probation period that German employment contracts commonly use, so any concern is raised while both sides can still act on it.

We wrote a one-page briefing for the team leads on how to run the checkpoints, and drafted the welcome email and the first-week schedule as templates.

Result

In this scenario the first three starters under the programme ran their own full portfolio after ten weeks, against five months before. None of the three left during probation. Team leads spent about twelve hours per starter in structured time over ninety days, less than the estimated twenty hours of interruptions the old sink-or-swim approach had cost them. Owners’ meetings run by new managers stopped producing complaints, because nobody now chairs one without having watched two first.

The programme is written down, so the next starter gets the same ninety days whichever team lead they report to.

What it cost

€3,400 fixed price for one role level: starter interviews, the 30-60-90 day programme with checklists, checkpoint templates, the team-lead briefing and the first-week templates. The price was quoted before the work started. The engagement is covered by our 100% money-back guarantee: full refund on request within 14 days of delivery.

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