Understandably, you may feel reluctant to hand over your property for someone else to manage. After all, you don’t expect anybody to feel the pain of loss as much as you would if your investment fails to yield. Nevertheless, your fears can’t outweigh the numerous benefits you can expect from a qualified property manager. At the very least, it gives you more free time to focus on the most important tasks to maximize profits.
In there lies the major problem, how do you get the perfect hire? Property managers are expected to balance plenty of tasks
so both the tenant and property owner are happy. At the same time, they are tasked with maintaining the property, keeping or improving the value of the property, while also coughing up profit.
Also, property management effectively cuts across various disciplines. They help with law, accounting, construction, marketing, and even psychology to some extent. Perhaps that is why most landowners prefer their property managers to have at least a high school degree.
Whatever the case, hiring a property manager is undoubtedly a sensitive task. There are four hurdles you must hope that the candidates can cross before you can trust them with your property.
The first indicator of a candidate’s worth is their past. There is no shortage of corporations and agencies that offer their best services and fastest responses when they are receiving payments, but nothing before or after.
Fortunately for us, digitization has afforded access to as much information as we need. By looking at the past experiences of the people that have acquainted themselves with that agency or firm, we get a clear idea of what we can expect from them.
Observe agencies that have at least 500 reviews, and an average rating of at least 4.5 out of 5. Additionally, ensure that the employees have good things to say about the methods and culture of the agency, to avoid hiring a team of grumbling and unsatisfied workers.
During your search, do your best to evaluate the mode of operation of the candidates. Try to discover if they are readily available and accessible through various sources, which is not limited to phone calls, texts, online messengers like WhatsApp or lives in proximity.
You can tell if an agency is reachable if they have social media handles that regularly updates landlords and occupying or prospective tenants about relevant information. If you find that the candidates are hard to reach, you can surmise that they will be equally unreliable to your tenants.
There is an undefined timeline of priority for tenant complaints and inquiries. A property manager that will be an asset to you, will have a good sense of what should be high up the scale of preference aimed at problem solution for the property. In essence, they will know what is more important to treat at every point in time.
A true manager will have the interests of your property at heart before anything else. This means that they would do everything they can to cut costs that would normally be invited for maintaining the property.
In most scenarios, hired property managers give out these maintenance tasks and duties to external parties or subcontractors. They are infamous for inflating their wages. Therefore, a good question to ask your potential property manager
before hiring them is if they already have a team of workers who will offer services at subsidized charges.
In any case, be sensitive and trust your instincts when looking to hire a property manager. If the prospect manages to possess all of the qualities outlined above, then you have yourself a gem.
