To ensure you have a successful and profitable investment experience, you should always let your management company do the managing of your property. Today, we’re taking a look at the four key reasons this is important.
Communication Should Come from Property Managers
When speaking to your tenants, it’s best to not use words like safety and security. Let your manager communicate with your tenants. If you improperly imply that you have certain safety and security features and you don’t, you could run into some legal trouble. There are a lot of other trigger words that you really have to be careful using. If you’re communicating directly with your tenant, avoid using these words or refer them to your property manager.
Construction and Maintenance Work Require Professionalism Understanding the repair process might be difficult. Whether it’s a water intrusion or you’re simply providing a notice to enter, tenants will sometimes not allow you to go into the property and view anything that might need a repair. When you're dealing with construction repairs in tenant occupied units, you might not understand the potential issues that can arise.
Legal processes influence construction work, and there are also many options available when you’re doing a repair. Some of these options are considerably more costly. When you take that on yourself instead of relying on the helping hand of a manager, you run the risk of inflating your costs or creating difficult tenant issues. You always want to make sure you are dealing with someone who has the expertise and the licensing to do the necessary work. The best way to do that is to let your manager handle it. Rent Collection and Lease Enforcement
Let’s say a tenant has requested to pay their rent late and has incurred late fees. Your manager has already given the tenant instructions on the late fees and how to pay them. The tenant may think they can come to you and give an excuse to avoid late fees. Or, maybe there is a tenant who has paid rent late in previous months. You really want your manager to handle all rent collection because it helps avoid any confusion, and potential legal disputes.
If you have a lot of properties, there is no way to keep track of everyone. Even on a small property, you may not know all the ins and outs of the tenant’s previous rental history. So again, the best thing to do is to refer to your property manager. They keep records of all the income and expenses associated with your property. It could potentially lead to bigger legal issues if you ever had to serve an eviction, and there are questions or disputes about when payments were made. Tenant Placement and Screening
Approving qualified applications must be done on a first come/first served basis. Let your property manager run the credit checks. It’s a big issue for a lot of owners. They want to have a manager do the managing, but they often want to have some say in the process of tenant selection. Randomly choosing tenants is not legal. You need to trust your property manager and know that they are going to place the best tenant for you. They will do credit checks, background checks, and any other research that’s needed. Managers follow all the legal guidelines for the tenant selection. When owners try to pick and choose themselves, they can run into serious problems.
If you have any other questions about how to leave the management of your property to the professionals, please feel free to contact us at The HLW Group.