Scott Hampton, who founded Hampton and Hampton with his wife in 2004, has seen the continued growth of the rental proptech sector over the last 20 years. With virtual becoming a buzzword in basically every industry, property management included, Hampton and Hampton has had to challenge some its preheld notions about the industry and learn how to best leverage virtual processes in the business. There are good parts and bad parts of an increasingly virtual world, and Hampton was kind enough to share his experiences trying to navigate this.
One area where Hampton has committed to the benefits of a virtual approach is in showings. The rise of the virtual showing during COVID changed quite a bit for Hampton and Hampton, and Scott was very honest his old-school nature creating some qualms about the process, but the benefits were real as well.
“Before COVID, people were still uncomfortable,” says Hampton. “They wanted someone to show up and shake their hand and open the door. Now, people are perfectly fine with getting a code on a code box. And I can sit on a Zoom call or Google Meet call with you on my phone. I can do it on a laptop.”
The flexibility is really the big win with virtual showings. The logistical burden gets lifted quite a bit. The concept may not have unpopular in the past with prospective residents, but Hampton has seen a shift in how open renters are to more virtual processes.
“I've seen our staff show houses on their phone at lunch and just walk the people through the house, literally, anywhere they're at and the people are fine with that. And then obviously just send them a link for the application and do everything digitally for that right there and to grease the skids as I say, to make that transaction as easy as possible for them. So you know, I think virtual showings have been a huge change for us.”
While there are drawbacks to virtual showings that Hampton will touch on, the win here for the PMC is ease of logistical management. You no longer have to get an agent to a place and coordinate that. It just helps remove so much of extra legwork.
"Logistically, it's hard when you're in two cities," says Hampton. "Even though you have staff in two cities, it's still logistically difficult to do that, to coordinate those things and to get that many people around. So that's helped."
A lot has gone virtual over the last four years, for better or worse, and the geographic reach of the hiring companies has seen some of the biggest change.
This virtual outsourcing has helped Hampton and Hampton be more efficient in the post-sales process, which in turn allows their salespeople to be more efficient and do the things they are more cut out to do.
“We now work a lot more with virtual people. Not virtual companies per se that are out there, but currently, we have more virtual folks that are more like sales agents that are in other cities. They write contracts for us. They handle closings. I've never met some of our virtual closing people. They literally are US-based real estate agents and they write the contract they get handed the contract once it goes, they go to get the inspections done, and they get the financing in place. So the salespeople can kind of just move on to another sale and not be bogged down dealing with, you know, did the inspection get done today? Did the electric get turned on? And so we do a lot more with that."
Property management will also be a people business. Good PMs understand optimizations and processes built on tech is not a golden ticket. Relationships matter, and one of the drawbacks of a more virtual world is the spiking difficulty of managing relationship.
"That's really hard to do," says Hampton. "It's just really hard to to convey that to people. I used to know the tenants' names and they used to know me. I rented them the house and, you know, I knew their boys. Same with the clients. I used to know their voice, but you lose that touch. So it's very hard and that's the one thing too that I think we all lose is that personal touch of a human relationship."