Mark Brower is the owner and designated broker of Mark Brower Properties. He has over 15 years of experience in property management and investing, and lives in Mesa, Arizona. Mark is a Second Nature Triple Win Mentor.
People buy who you are, not what you do. You need to lead with who you are as an individual and as a company, rather than just the services you offer.
Developing, sharing, and living out your core values is vital to showing your potential clients that you’re genuine. Your core values don’t just define your property management company's mission and culture, but also how you interact with both residents and owners.
Let’s dive into some tactical ways that you can create effective core values, and along the way I’ll share some of my experiences writing core values for my own property management company.
Understand the purpose of your core values
Your core values underpin your property management company’s mission and vision. When done well, they guide every decision and action that your company takes, across policies and processes, team members, and client agreements.
When everything rolls up to a strong set of values, you can make more consistent decisions and run a more effective business. The vital factor here is that they can’t just be something you write and then tuck away in a drawer. You have to live them every day in everything that you do.
How many core values should a company have?
Whenever business leaders try to write core values for the first time, they inevitably want to know how many they need. This is a question that, for a long time, I struggled to answer.
It’s always bothered me that, in the hierarchy of things we believe in and value, we have to draw a line somewhere to say, “These are the things we care about, and the rest don’t make the list.” As a business owner, I have dozens of things that I care about and believe strongly in, so why narrow it down to just a short list?
It’s important to get very specific about your core values because they’re a reflection of who you are as a business. For that reason, they should show the things that you currently do, rather than being aspirational.
Having a manageable number of values also helps make them more memorable, which makes it more likely that your team members will keep them top of mind and embody them in their daily work.
In psychology, there’s a theory that people best remember lists of five to nine items. I’d recommend using this as a guide for how many core values to develop.
The good news is that the values that don't make the list can still be important. You don’t have to completely abandon all other beliefs and values just because they aren’t core values.
Core values vs. Brand Principles
One thing that helped me come to terms with a more limited list of core values was understanding the difference between core values and brand principles. When I started working with a fractional Chief Marketing Officer in 2024, we worked on clarifying that difference.
Core values are often somewhat abstract. They’re character traits or belief systems. On the other hand, brand principles are the tactical ways that you bring those core values to life. They describe how you manifest your core values.
Some of my company’s brand principles include:
- Own the outcome
- Highly responsive communication
- Exceptional service
- Transparency
These are clear ways that we can live out our values, but they aren’t core values themselves. We’ll get deeper into my company’s core values later.
How to write your company core values
So how do you actually get to writing your core values? Several years ago I had the opportunity to join a small entrepreneurship group, and one of the activities we worked on together was writing our core values from scratch. Here’s how we did it.
1. Brainstorm core values
The common starting point for core values is to brainstorm a list of potential words or short phrases, then group similar ones together. For example, honesty, integrity, and truthfulness might be grouped. I recommend taking a slightly different approach.
To start brainstorming, take inventory of the people in your life who you most admire and most respect. Ask yourself why you respect them so much. What about them makes you trust and admire them?
On the flip side, think about the people who bother you, or rub you the wrong way, or don’t come across as trustworthy. What about their behavior makes you feel that way?
Use those traits and behaviors as the basis for your core values. I like this approach because it’s not just looking at the values, but also the antithesis of those values. It gives you better context and substance so that you really have a well-rounded perspective as you write.
Consider ChatGPT
I also think that large language AI models can be really useful, not in giving you your specific core values, but in helping you along the way. You’re obviously not going to ask, “What are some good core values for a residential property management business?”
Instead, come up with a sophisticated prompt. Ask the tool to walk you through an exercise to clarify your core values. For example, “The outcome of this exercise is that I will have a list of 6-8 most important core values that can be a useful framework for hiring and firing decisions and employee reviews. I work in the residential property management space. Please ask me a series of questions to help me uncover what my core values are.”
This can replace a lot of the process pieces of traditional brainstorming methods, and help you find your values faster.
2. Narrow your list
Once you have your brainstorming ideas grouped, you should identify the single word or phrase from each group that best describes your company.
After you’ve got just one word or phrase per topic, it’s time to make the tough decisions. This is where you have to decide what’s truly most important to your business, and, as I said before, tease out what’s actually a value versus what’s a business principle.
3. Write your core values
Here’s where you want to actually define the meaning of each core value. You want them to be clear and concise so that everyone in your company can easily understand them, including the behavior that’s expected from each.
I strongly believe that phrases, rather than words, bring color, texture, and meaning, which will help your staff truly grasp them and live them out.
Who should be involved?
I am a strong believer that diversity of opinions drives better outcomes. Even when it means slowing down a project, I think getting a lot of opinions is worth it for the improved outcome.
That said, with values, there’s no room for diversity. There can’t be tolerance for team members who aren’t aligned on values, or else the values lose meaning.
As a leader, I am the keeper of the values. Part of my job is to make sure that everyone on my team is aligned and believes in the values. They can’t be designed by committee.
The one place where it is very helpful to get input is in the brainstorming phase. Your team members will often have a better sense of what values you’re actually embodying, which can be hugely informative. Remember, the truth is what we do, not what we say, so it’s valuable to get opinions on the values that you’re currently living out.
Perfect is the enemy of done
One pitfall that I often see in small businesses, both across the board and with values specifically, is perfectionism. This is especially true for founders and entrepreneurs, and it was definitely true for me.
I spent weeks and months thinking through my values, revising them, and trying to perfect them. The truth is, you need to accept that your values are going to get about 70-80% of the way to perfection, and not second guess them. Overanalyzing can be devastating, because it only delays the process. You should find a framework that works for you and stick to it, rather than adding revision after revision at the end of the process.
Best practices for writing core values for a property management company
In truth, your core values should always be a reflection of who you are and how you run your business. Don’t pretend to be someone you’re not. Be who you are right now, not what you think your audience wants to see. Your value stems from who you are, and you should lead with that authenticity.
Here are some ideas that might help inspire values that align with your business:
- Focus on how you create value: If your company is truly focused on resident experience, for instance, that's something you want to be represented in your values.
- Reflect transparency: Does your company put a heavy emphasis on being totally open with what happens when things go wrong? If so, consider having something about proactive and vulnerable communication.
- Display competence: Are you engaged in the right routines to stay on top of the industry trends and acquire the best tools to serve your clients? This could inspire some of your values.
- Encourage diversity of perspectives not diversity of values: Be inclusive of different perspectives in most areas of your business, but when it comes to values, don't budge. Get them right and hold the line on who you are.
Property management company core values examples
In some ways, I hesitate to share my company’s core values directly. That’s not because they’re particularly private—in fact, we publish them directly on our website (as should you). What gives me pause is that I don’t want you to be influenced by my core values at the expense of being genuine with your own.
That said, if you’re looking for an example of property management core values, here they are:
- Speed of trust: We believe trust is built through transparency and reliability, ensuring swift and honest communication
- Integrity: Honesty and ethical practices form the foundation of our business relationships
- Reliable: You can depend on us to manage your property with care and precision
- Humility: We approach our work with humility, wanting to learn and grow, open to new ideas and uncovering blind spots
- Partnership: We foster long-term relationships based on mutual respect and shared success, working closely with our clients, tenants, and community.
I developed these as a second round revision of our core values, about seven years after writing our first set. With a new fractional CMO and a company that had evolved significantly, it felt like the right time.
Reviewing and refining your core values
I think it’s healthy and important to revisit your core values from time to time. We often see core values as being written in stone. In reality, changing them over time doesn’t mean that you’ve somehow lost your way, it just means you’re keeping a pulse on your identity.
In fact, you should always be evaluating whether your values are still true to who you are. It’s always beneficial to the business to have a mindset of questioning things and looking at them from new angles. If that leads you to revise your core values, then all the better. But to me, the process is as important or more important than actually updating things. The discussion and engagement are key.
This is another good opportunity to involve staff in the review process, because you can get a better sense of how much they understand and embody those values.
Living your values
Your core values should inform everything you do. You need to instill a culture where everyone at the company is true to the values, no matter what.
You’re not going to convert someone to your core values after you hire them. Hire for core values and go from there. Similarly, if someone on your team doesn’t align with the company’s values, it may be time to reevaluate whether it’s a good fit.
Whenever you have feedback sessions and performance reviews, you should be considering your values. You need to constantly review whether your behavior—both as individuals and as a business—manifests your values, or doesn’t. If not, it’s time to make some changes.
We’ve recently been revising our policy manual. As we’ve done that, we’ve had our core values up on the screen so that we can look at every single policy we have and say, “does this truly align with our values?” If not, then why is it a policy? How can we rewrite it to make it more in line with who we want to be? If a core value or brand principle conflicts with a policy in any given situation, the winner is the brand principle or the core value.
I was recently visiting the offices of a company I work with and I saw on the wall a laminated piece of paper. It looked something like this:
It was a table, and down the left side it listed the company’s core values. Across the top was a ranking system from “Doesn’t display values at all” to “very much displays values”.
And in each box on the grid, they had written specific examples of what kinds of interactions you would have that represented each value well or poorly. It was extremely clear and extremely powerful, because it showed exactly what the behaviors look like. It was a perfect illustration of how your core values take shape in each and every little interaction that you have.
Who is this really for?
A lot of property managers are struggling just to tread water. Especially for smaller or newer companies, that just comes with the territory. So you might be asking, “Hey, I barely have time to make coffee in the morning, never mind enough time to write core values. Does this whole thing even apply to me?”
The answer, to me, is that it depends on where you want to go. In my opinion, any company who wants to continue to grow and hire new team members needs to prioritize core values.
If you’re a sole proprietor with a couple of assistants, 100 to 150 doors, and no plans to expand, maybe you don’t need to go through this exercise. In a lot of ways, when you’re a team of one, your core values live within you. You may not need to write them up. The benefit of clarity isn’t as high when you don’t have staff.
On the other hand, if you want to grow to 400, 500, or 1,000 units under management, it becomes increasingly important to clarify and clearly articulate what your core values are.
Part of the recipe for having a very successful property management company is having clarity on core values and brand principles. The larger the organization is, the more intentional you have to be on how they’re articulated.
Make your company core values Second Nature
Remember, the key point here is the craft values that resonate with your staff and your residents, and that will help to strengthen your brand. It’s about being genuine and sincere, not being someone you’re not.
If being resident-centric is one of your core values, consider how Second Nature’s Resident Benefits Package can help demonstrate your commitment to a positive resident experience.
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February 11, 2025
