The first version of our monthly report ran to fourteen pages. It had charts. It was, by any professional standard, thorough, and almost nobody read it past the second page.
The lesson was not that owners are uninterested. It was that a long report transfers work from us to them. Every page an owner has to interpret is a page where we have failed to reach a conclusion on their behalf.
So we cut. Out went the charts, the occupancy graphs, the market commentary and the photographs that existed to fill space. What remained: money in, money out, what we did, what we advise, what happens next, and images taken that month.
One page. Nine minutes. The measure of a good report is not how much it contains — it is how little the reader has to do with it.