Be Quick, But Don't Hurry: A Lease We Lost, and the Lesson That Stuck

Coach John Wooden said it to his players at practice for decades: be quick, but don't hurry. Speed and panic are not the same thing. One wins games. The other loses them. I've come to believe it applies to nearly every part of running a property management business — and I learned it again recently the hard way.

Here's what happened.

An application came in on a single-family rental. Most applications sort themselves quickly. A strong file is obvious — solid earnings, clean credit, landlord references that check out. A risky file is just as obvious. This one landed in the grey area in between, which is exactly where judgment earns its keep. My due diligence took two days. That's a little slower than usual, but I was waiting on confirming documents and I wasn't going to skip them.

The complication: the owner was traveling, phone reception was spotty, and because this wasn't a clean yes, I wanted the owner's eyes on it before committing. Two days after they got home, with the remaining questions answered, they decided to move forward.

I called the applicant with the good news. They'd already signed somewhere else.

So what happened? Nothing unusual, when you think about it from the applicant's side. Good prospects are looking at multiple properties at once, and when one of those properties works for them, they're often submitting multiple applications. From their seat, whoever moves fastest wins. We were thorough. We just weren't quick.

Here's the part I want to be careful about, though — because the wrong lesson is "go faster, skip the checks." That's how you rent to the wrong person and buy yourself an eviction. An eviction costs far more in time, money, and stress than a vacancy does. Don't hurry. If you overlook a detail to save a day, you may pay for it for six months.

The right lesson is Wooden's. Be quick and thorough — they aren't in conflict. The fix isn't cutting corners; it's removing the lag that has nothing to do with diligence. In this case the delay wasn't the document verification — that was the work. The delay was a decision-maker who was unreachable and a grey-area file with no pre-agreed path.

What I'm changing going forward: set owner expectations before a property hits the market about how fast we need to move and who can decide when the owner is unreachable; pre-authorize a clear approval framework so a grey-area applicant doesn't have to wait on a vacation schedule; and run document verification on a parallel track rather than a sequential one. The diligence stays. The dead time goes.

Be quick, but don't hurry. The applicants who win in this market reward the managers who've already done the thinking, so the only thing left to do is move.