DILEMMA

Auben Realty's portfolio of managed properties was growing fast, but the company had only one showing agent — whose schedule was full every week, while just 30% of appointments actually showed up. Growth was creating an operational bottleneck, not a sales one.

PROCESS

Going to where the work happens. Rather than starting from a vendor evaluation or a spreadsheet, the work started with a Gemba walk — spending time directly with the showing agent to observe his actual day. Interviewing him about his workflow surfaced the friction that operational reporting couldn't: where the process broke down, what prospective tenants did between booking and showing, and which steps existed only because no one had questioned them. Mapping the original process made the failure points visible as a system rather than a series of complaints.

Looking outward before deciding. The improvement cycle deliberately drew on evidence beyond the building. Conversations with other property management companies, industry research, and sector conferences established how comparable operators had solved the same problem — so the eventual choice was tested against practice rather than invented from scratch.

Designing the new process. Multiple options were evaluated against the agent's real working day rather than a theoretical one. The team selected ShowMojo, a scheduling platform integrated with electronic lockboxes, and rebuilt the showing process around it — expanding listing syndication and adding touchpoints with prospective tenants throughout the process rather than only at the moment of booking. The redesign addressed the no-show problem at its cause: prospects who had booked and then heard nothing until the appointment.

Codifying what was learned. The findings didn't stop at the scheduling fix. Structured input from subject matter experts across the business was translated into Auben Realty's Property Management Operations Manual — converting tacit operational knowledge held in individual heads into a standing institutional resource.

TENSIONS NAVIGATED The constraint was structural: a portfolio expanding faster than the processes running it, with no resources to solve the problem the obvious way by adding headcount. That ruled out the easy answer and forced the harder one — improving the process itself, enabled by technology rather than staffed around. The solution had to do work a person would otherwise have done: the platform confirmed and followed up with prospects to verify they still intended to attend, and its integration with electronic lockboxes gave prospective tenants secure, code-based self-service access. Capacity was created by redesigning the process, not by expanding the team.

SOLUTION After discovering the pain points, challenges, and opportunities for process improvement, I spoke with other property management companies to discover how they overcame this dilemma. I also performed internet research and attended industry conferences.

We considered multiple options but we ultimately decided on a scheduling platform called ShowMojo. It was a SaaS platform that integrated with electronic lockboxes. The platform collected inquires, showing requests, and increased the amount of touch points on the prospective tenant. This allowed us to implement a more robust process that made our operations more efficient.