Effective communication lies at the heart of any successful company. Without it, companies can lose their sense of mission and staff can lose their sense of camaraderie. It is essential that all the major players within an organization have a regular time set aside to exchange ideas and trade information.

This is certainly true of a company that is in the business of buying and selling houses to tenant buyers. In such a company, you cannot leave anything to chance-particularly communication. You must plan for healthy communication in order to ensure that your company will remain on a solid footing.

Its best, then, if the company can hold monthly meetings. It's wise, for instance, to hold a meeting during the first full week of the month on a Monday. Our meeting may start around 10 a.m. in order to give staffers ample opportunity to prepare for it. Because of all the information that must be shared, the meeting is likely to last most of the day.

Those in attendance for the meeting will include the head of the company, the mortgage liaison, the acquisitions manager, and the administrator. Each of these individuals have different concerns to bring to the table. It's best if the meeting is scheduled off-site, we do ours at a hotel. You're likely to get more done that way because you have time to focus without worrying about interruptions, such as phone calls from prospective tenant-buyers, visits from current tenant-buyers, messages from contractors, and the like.

Ordinarily, the meeting would open with a report from the mortgage liaison, who would discuss which houses are lined up that month to sell. The liaison reviews each property, noting what the mortgage brokers are saying about it, what the tenant buyers are doing, and what can be done to assist the liaison. Because of all the properties that must be discussed, it usually takes us anywhere from an hour and a half to two hours to review the entire list.

One issue that came up at one of our meetings was that there was no real incentive for tenants to buy their houses within a year. As a result, the liaison was suffering quite a bit of hardship. So we decided to add a new incentive: after one year's time, the price of the monthly payment and the price of the property would rise. That's just the incentive some people needed to purchase the homes they were living in.