Frequently Asked Questions
Outsourcing is where you outsource the task to an external third party. Like you do with your tax or auditing if you engage an accountant to do those tasks. Offshoring is where you engage someone offshore to do tasks where you have direct control over their output. Like you do with your admin staff who are onshore. You are responsible for their output just like you are now with onshore staff. UPS offers a co-managed service. This is where we assist you setting up the infrastructure of engaging someone offshore but you are still responsible for the output.
There was a time when the average commission rate in a Property Management business was 7%. This enabled healthy profit margins of around 30%. A drop from an average commission rate of 7% to 5% is not a drop in income of 2%, it is a massive 28.5% drop potentially wiping out your profit margin. There is pressure everywhere to reduce the 7% rate. It is not unheard of to see Property Managers reducing their rates to 3%. With income falling, the only way to maintain a profitable Property Management business is for the expenses to reduce.
Let’s say you want to hire a Digital Marketing Manager to improve your brand awareness and generate more sales. The average salary of a digital marketing manager in Australia is probably around $60,000 to $80,000 a year plus other costs. By offshoring, you can get a qualified global talent to do these tasks at a lower cost of say $20,000. The money that you saved can be used to further grow your business which in turn leads to more staff.
INCREASE EMPLOYEE SATISFACTION
Real Estate is governed by rules and regulations resulting in a bulk of administrative tasks. Offshoring takes away these repetitive admin tasks from the hands of your onshore staff. Instead, they can focus on their strengths and more revenue generating tasks. For instance, taking away sales and marketing admin tasks from your agents, gives them more time to build trusting relationships with landlords, tenants, and other clients. Higher value work makes happier employees. Happy employees means greater staff retention, satisfaction, and work output.
FOCUS ON STAFF DEVELOPMENT
The funds you saved through offshoring can be reallocated to provide training and support systems for your existing staff. The growth of your business lies on the growth of your employees. Growth oriented employees value companies that care about their careers. If they have sufficient resources to support them in doing their jobs, they can do more than what is expected of them.
You may be thinking, why can’t I just go to the Philippines, establish my own team and do it all myself? Or why can’t I just look for freelance virtual assistants online? It may look easy but the rules and regulations that govern Philippine real estate and labor greatly differs with Australia.
If you want to offshore on your own. You have to understand the difference with the way the Philippines does Real Estate. In the Philippines, tenants pay direclyt to landlords at a predetermined date. The guiding policies and government legislation are not as tight as they are in Australia.
Another challenge is hiring the right team and managing them. If you do this on your own, you may find yourself drowning in human resource concerns from both your onshore and offshore teams.
We provide data cleansing, standard workflow templates, cloud-based day-to-day monitoring, performance evaluation, and result-focused business evolution assistance. Our goal is to make offshoring as seamless and convenient for you.
At UPS, we make the confidentiality of your data a top priority and we are very serious about protecting it. The set-up of computers and the steps we take provide a higher level of security than virtually any Real Estate office in Australia. Among these measures include disabling USB ports for potential data download and strict login codes setup to Property Management and Sales Software.
UPS provides a phased-in approach to your UPS position to drive efficiency and capacity within your business. Your UPS team member is under the direct supervision of our positional team leader and overseen directly by our UPS team managers who each have over 10 years industry experience. Our Operations Manager, Colin Rodgers is also based in our UPS office for at least 200 days per year, so you can be assured that your team member is supervised and trained to the highest standard. UPS manages the growth of positional tasks with you so new tasks are added to meet your operational needs before they arise.
Universal Property Systems provides a 30-day training program to its team members within a position before they go on board with our clients. During the training program the team member must pass our Core Competency tests which are directly related to the positional requirements including software use, system and process knowledge and awareness of relevant legislation.
We will find an employee that is available to work during the shift you specify after signup. It is however easier to find a quality employee if you’re willing to have them work your night time (their daytime). Either way, many employees are accustomed to working at night and the final working hours will be up to you.
What do our clients say about us?
"Working with UPS has been really easy and streamlined, I only need to tell our team member to do things once, she is really proactive in her approach in getting stuff done. I'm enjoying the overall compliance that UPS brings to the business. It's a standard that we can monitor and see what's missing and what we need to improve."
"Our team has been using UPS for around three years in our property management and accounting departments. During that time we've had a really positive experience with the entire team. They're always happy to help us and they've helped the team on the ground speak more regularly with landlords and tenants on the phone and be more compliant in our day-to-day work."
"As Console faces the challenges of COVID-19, one of our partners who has been with us through every step of the way has been Universal Property Systems. They did not miss a beat, they have been available to us 24 hours a day, seven days a week and that ongoing support has been super appreciated."
"What we love about UPS is that you guys do all the training and mentoring of staff and that keeps the staff accountable. We get the best out of each and every employee and they turn out to be very skilled and very efficient."
"My grandmother remembers when they invented the TV, I remember when they invented the internet, but I'll never forget when UPS came into our business and changed our world."
