EPMEPM: Best Practice & Legislation

War! What Is It Good For?

THE ISSUES IN A PROPERTY management conflict are rarely overly difficult, but the people experiencing those issues certainly can be. EPM Editor Sarah Bell has some advice for understanding and managing conflict between all parties: tenants, landlords and you.

WITH ALL THE contextual and cultural baggage that people bring with them, it really is no wonder that property managers face such intensity and distress when working with parties in conflict.

Understanding how we react in conflict, as well as how others react, helps us to create an optimal environment for parties to communicate. It will help you adapt your words and actions towards assisting parties to resolve their issues and to restore the relationships involved.

The way that we frame and perceive conflict in our nominal Australian culture is pretty unhelpful. As we ingest the wonderful world of Disney as kids, we learn some binary concepts about conflict that help simple stories make sense but don’t necessarily serve us so well through maturity and complexity. The goodies win, the baddies lose. Winning happens to the righteous and losing is shameful.

The labels of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ that are laid over the concepts of winning and losing make it difficult for parties to work together and compromise. Our first reactions to conflict are still primal (fight or flight), and when someone feels threatened and is in a hyper-aroused fight-flight response it can be extremely challenging to make them see sense.

There are six main reactions to conflict: Fight, flight, surrender, blame, negotiate and innovate.

FLIGHT is one of our most sacred human urges. If you are facing a predator that is about to eat you, running away from it if you can is the smartest move to stay alive and conserve energy. In modern conflicts about, say, the speed at which a hot water system needs to be repaired, the flight response is not so helpful. It avoids the issue and the parties’ positions remain in conflict; in the absence of a solution, the intensity and costs involved can only increase. Neither side can gain anything, so it is a lose-lose approach.

As it is based on fear, flight, in this case, is an irrational response. It is best to highlight the increased costs of delay and that having a resolution will allow the parties to move forward.

FIGHT is our other primal response. If we can’t run away from the predator, we must fight. In this context the goal is survival, and that means winning at all costs. This takes an aggressive or defensive position, which can manifest in a determination to ‘conquer’ the other party – perhaps by demanding the full cost of replacement for a ten-year-old carpet. In this example, conceding that the carpet had depreciated in value and accepting a contribution towards a new carpet means ‘losing’ the fight. It is an irrational response and can be difficult to get a client past the desire for a ‘win all lose all’ outcome.

It is best to highlight that the Tribunals are designed to award fairness, not righteousness or justice.

By proceeding to Tribunal a party certainly loses its ability to control the outcome and they run the risk of losing more than has been offered in private negotiations.

SURRENDER is another form of avoidance and is essentially giving up. We have all been there – too tired or time-poor to fight – and so the other party wins all, simply because the cost of losing is less than the cost of fighting.

Be aware that a surrender is not the same as an agreed outcome and the issue itself remains unresolved. For example, if a landlord is prepared to let vacating tenants walk on their cleaning responsibilities at the end of a tenancy and not fight the vacate, the incoming tenants may take issue with the cleanliness of the property and bring cause against the landlord, setting him or her up for more conflict – only this one will need to be resolved in the new tenants’ interest, not the landlord’s. Thus the issue isn’t dealt with and may come up later, reactively, and so surrender is also an irrational response to conflict.

BLAME feels like an irrational response to conflict, but in fact, it is a calculated strategy employed by litigators and insurance companies all the time. Blame, or evading responsibility, is essentially a tactical delay to see if the other party will surrender. In the PM context, it might be tenants refusing to pay for the damage and claiming ‘fair wear and tear’, or refusing to pay for cleaning and claiming that ‘the property is cleaner now that when I moved in’ (that old chestnut!).

It is best to bring the other party back to the issue and back to record of evidence because the ultimate card that the ‘blamer’ can play is to submit their claim to a higher authority to decide. This is full of risk because the Tribunal will also come back to the issues, the facts and the record of evidence.

Although blame can sound as aggressive as the fight response, remember that it is coming from a rational place. You can reinforce that if the conflict does go to a Tribunal to be decided by someone else; perhaps they will lose or perhaps both parties will lose.

NEGOTIATION is a rational response where both parties are reacting in a way that we would deem reasonable; we start to look at what one party is prepared to concede in order to win on other points. As a property manager, there are some intangible and high-impact items that you can bring to negotiations to assist in the points-winning process.

It costs around 11 cents to print off a written rental reference for tenants, yet a fear of not being approved on future properties might be something preventing tenants from letting go of an issue. Developing and administering payment plans through written agreement and trust may help balance the landlord’s recovery of capital expenses with the tenant’s cash flow and affordability concerns. Remember, if you have a written agreement signed by all parties and one defaults, you can go to Tribunal and simply seek enforcement of the agreement – the Tribunal won’t hear arguments about the contents of the agreement at that stage.

INNOVATE requires a negotiation but, unlike the points exchange, innovation is about reaching a new solution that doesn’t require either party to back down. If a tenant wants a dog approved, they may propose to build a fence at the property. The owner has an improved asset and the tenant has their pet.

The swift resolution of a conflict in tenancies assists both parties to move forward, and being able to facilitate a consensus in a dispute will save tenants and landlords both time and money. Understanding how people in conflict behave can help you to apply tact and leverage where needed to limit the aggravation or irritation that can come along with protracted conflict.

In 1965, Lennon and McCartney gave us words so wise that they were immortalised just five years later by the great Stevie Wonder, “Life is very short; and there’s no time for fussing and fighting, my friends… we can work it out”. When the great philosophers of our time speak – we should listen. Property managers, we can work it out.

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Sarah Bell

With a background in research and investigations, Sarah Bell married into the real estate industry in 2009 and has found a passion for both the business and its people.