You’ve asked your prospective property manager everything you need to know to believe that they’re going to treat your tenants with the proper mix of respect and authority. Now, it’s time to determine how they’re going to treat your property itself: Do You Have Someone Available 24/7 For Emergencies? If a tenant’s furnace breaks down […]
So you’ve decided to hire a property manager — awesome! But how do you know which property manager is the right one? There are two basic steps: do your own research, and once you’ve gotten a short list of PMs you’d be willing to give a shot, interview each of them and write down the […]
Living alone doesn’t have to crimp your style — just know what your problems are going to be, and get them before they get you. It doesn’t matter if you’re moving out of your Dad’s house, or the dorm where you shared a kitchen with six other people — when you move into your first […]
Renovate (ren-oh-VAIT), v: “to make new again,” from the Latin reno meaning “money pit,” (see Reno, Nevada) + vate meaning “the act of upending your wallet into.” c. 13th century British. Renovating a home after a client has given it to your property management company to oversee is pretty much part-and-parcel of today’s PMing world. […]
Doing a serious deep-clean before the first tenant is a must, but between tenants, it’s often just a waste of money. When you get that notice from a tenant that says “Candace is out — peace,” you know what needs to happen, and one of those things is that you need to get the place […]
“Hey, RRP. We just purchased a property out of foreclosure, and we know nothing about it.” There’s few times more hectic in a property manager’s life than the moment that a client calls you with those words. You know, right away, that you’re going to be a busy manager for the next few days at […]
Are We Penalizing The Right People, The Right Way? In 2009, Saginaw passed a law requiring landlords to include a section in their lease agreements dubbed the ‘Crime Free Lease Addendum.’ In March of this year, Buena Vista Township (adjacent to Saginaw) passed the same law. In essence, this addendum adds a section to the […]
Sorry, We’re Not Talking About Your Neighbors (This Time). If you’ve ever seen — or think you’ve seen — a mouse skitter across your kitchen floor in the middle of the night, you’ve felt genuine adrenaline. And if you’ve ever seen a cockroach waving its antenna at you from your kitchen wall, well, you’ve felt […]
Clue Number One: It Has No Roof. It’s hard to say with confidence that any given part of a rental home is ‘more important’ than any other — they all kind of have to work together in a very specific way to accomplish their job — but if there was one part that fit the […]
We Started With a List of Twenty-Three, But We Narrowed It Down. It’s a little close to home, to be a property manager and decide to research what owners & tenants complain about their property managers about. But no matter what industry you’re in, it’s a good idea to have a firm grip on how […]