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Marc Cunningham is a property management consultant and he’s also the President of Grace Property Management in Colorado.

He’s joining The Property Management Show today not only because he’s a prominent figure in property management, but also because he’s one of the first property management professionals who embraced video marketing.

Marc is still promoting video marketing, and he believes it’s the most effective way to bring new business into your company.

A Bit of Background: Marc Cunningham

When Marc started his property management career as a child going to the office with his dad, things were incredibly different. It was the 1970s and buying their first copy machine was the most technology they had. The phone with an answering machine was fancy. Ledger cards were used to manually record when rent was collected, and checks were written to owners once a month.

His father recognized that technology was a great tool, and they not only got a computer before anyone else, but they also even hired a programmer out of California to write a custom property management program for them.

In the property management industry, there’s a big scare every couple of years.

The narrative goes, if you don’t do X, you’ll be left behind. Right now, it’s AI. If you’re not using AI, you’ll be left behind.

Marc says this is not always true. Provide good customer service to owners and tenants, and you’ll be okay even without the latest tool. You won’t wake up one day and be left behind.

It’s the shiny thing syndrome. If there’s something that everyone seems to be doing, you feel like you should be doing it, too.

It’s easy to chase the next big thing because everybody is talking about how cool it is.

Marc doesn’t chase the newest thing. Technology is something to leverage in order to improve your property management business.

After graduating from college with a degree in finance and real estate, Marc worked in the industry but not for his father. This helped him when it was time to go to work for his father. He brought a different perspective and a different set of skills to the family business. He always tells people in a family business to send the young people out to work outside of the business for a few years. It generates better ideas and higher level thinking.

Marc arrived at his father’s company with more of a business mindset. His father was very good at property management, and Marc found he was very good at business management.

Pioneering Video and Property Management Marketing

Marc is one of the first property management professionals to begin marketing his company with video. He still believes this is the best marketing tool for property managers.

Here’s how it happened.

He was at a conference, and on the way home from that conference, he began thinking about how much time he spent talking to potential owner clients. They all ask the same questions and he found himself having the same conversation over and over again. Wouldn’t it be great, he thought, if, instead of answering those common questions over and over again, he could put those answers in a video and have it on his website. Then, potential owner clients could watch the video and decide if they wanted to know more. Marc thought that if a video could save him multiple five-minute conversations, it would really add up to getting some serious time back.

He’s action-oriented and he doesn’t over-think.

So, when he got home, he had his then-11-year-old son stand on his desk with an iPhone and take a video of Marc talking about common property management expenses.

It was a three-minute video that included no script, no special lighting, and no microphone. The point was not quality. The point was to get it done.

This has worked better than any other marketing, Marc says, because prospective owner clients will call, and they’ve already seen the videos. That puts them at about a 7 out of 10 in terms of likelihood that they’ll come on board as a client.

Those owners feel like they already know Marc and the company. Marc says he’s not afraid to tell people to use video more because he knows they won’t do it. His competitors don’t.

The reason this works for Marc, he says, is because he’s not a perfectionist.

The Power of Action vs. Perfection

If you believe in the power of action, you’ll get the videos done, and you’ll let the results fall where they may.

Video marketing has been successful by keeping the acquisition costs for each client down. There’s no need to spend a lot on marketing when you have a YouTube channel full of great video content. The video version of Marc is available 24/7, and that means that the real life Marc has time to focus on other parts of his business. One video could be equal to 20 conversations he didn’t have to have in real life. Even if the video results in zero leads, he didn’t have to have all those chats with people who would not hire his company anyway.

The willingness to make videos creates a filter. No property manager is designed to serve every owner. The training Marc does with his property managers internally is called We Don’t Sell. When a lead comes in, he doesn’t want the goal to be closing the lead. The goal is to get to know the prospect and to decide if they’re a good client to do business with. There’s no starting with a sales mentality.

Videos will:

• Attract new potential clients.


• Filter out the clients you may not want to work with anyway.


• Answer common questions.

Video also snowballs for marketing and SEO purposes. The more times those videos get watched; the more Google promotes the videos. When they’re promoted, they’re watched more. And on and on.

Remember that this is a public space. You don’t have to make perfect videos, but you also don’t want to insult anyone. Marc made a video called “Five Things to Never Say to Your Tenant.” He’s not an anti-tenant property manager, but he must have said something in that video to upset someone, because it went viral in tenant groups and he started getting really hateful messages and comments. So, he took that video down.

It’s a fine line to walk. You want to be cautious, but you also want your personality to show through. A video won’t be as effective if it’s scripted. If you want to do some bullet points for yourself before you talk on camera, do it. But don’t read a script or generate something from your computer. Talk the way you’d talk to a client. It can be intimidating, but it’s effective.

It’s effective, but people don’t do it. Most property managers don’t use this effective and untapped marketing tool because they’re too obsessed with making the perfect video and they can’t, or because it’s easier to run ads and pay Google.

What Makes a Video Educational?

Marc has two distinct categories of video. One is educational and one is an FAQ that outlines how he does things. They’re separate.

Under the educational content umbrella is the content marketing that appeals to both prospective owner clients and current owners. It works to market for new business and retain current business.

Here’s a soft rule he says to remember: When you make a video, decide if you can show it to both audiences – the prospective clients and the current clients. If the answer is ever no, then it’s not providing enough education. When you have this rule in mind, you’ll keep your video from being too sales-focused. You won’t say “call us for a free consultation” because why would say that to current owners? When you can say yes, it applies to both current and prospective clients because you’re talking about tenant screening or maintenance costs, then you know it’s an educational video.

Marc believes content matters. His videos won’t be about how great his company is or how many degrees he has.

Nobody cares.

He maintained one massive email group of all current clients, all previous clients, and all prospective clients. Anyone who has ever provided an email address is in the group. It doesn’t matter if they’re working with a competitor or self-managing or if they’ve been with the company for years. These videos educate everyone.

People want to be educated. They’re not going to call you because of your great technology. They’re going to call you because you posted a video with some information on a new law that matters to them.

Marc doesn’t invest a lot of time in making videos. He began doing two videos a month and he’d record them both at the same time, and they’d end up being seven or eight minutes each.

It’s not a production.

There’s a simple backdrop. There are some good lights. There’s a tripod and a microphone. There’s usually one take. If he stumbles over a word, he reps going. It does not have to be perfect, and that’s why it doe