1. Maintenance and Repairs
At the top of the list for most property managers is, without a doubt, maintenance and repairs. Maintenance and repairs are absolutely essential to keep your property value up and your tenants happy. There is no faster way to lose a good tenant than by neglecting repairs that need to be done.
Unfortunately, maintenance and repairs don’t just eat up approximately 10% of your rental income each month. They also consume valuable time. Property managers are forced to search for contractors, plan a maintenance schedule and supervise work when necessary. Thankfully, apps and services can make organizing and managing maintenance and repairs a much smoother process. Property managers need to be aware of helpful tools that can save them and their clients time and money. Most importantly having a proper business partner can make life so much easier.
2. Tenant Retention
In today’s competitive rental market, retaining tenants, particularly the good ones, is becoming harder and harder. In 2017, 37% of buyers bought to rent, and with predicted growth in the rental market, you can expect many more investors to move into the rental space. This is good news for property managers but it also means that there will be more options available to tenants.
Modern technology also means that tenants have more choices than ever before. With a whole world of information at their fingertips, tenants today are constantly exposed to newer and better rental options. Holding onto your best tenants is no longer a simple task. Property managers need to be aware of trends and provide exceptional service or risk losing their best tenants.
3. Lack of Time
Maintenance and repairs aren’t the only things consuming a property managers time. Processing service requests, managing rental payments, contracting and more keep property managers very busy. For those that are managing multiple properties themselves, this can quickly turn into a situation where important things are neglected, leading to unhappy tenants.
Tenant retention needs to be a top priority for any property manager. Part of making your tenants feel valued is making time for them and that takes good time management. It is vital for busy property managers to hire people they can trust to handle any job, big and small.
4. Hiring Contractors
Whether you have an in-house maintenance team or not, as a property manager, at some point you will inevitably have to employ specialist contractors. This can be a huge headache if you are taking on a property in a new area. Not only do you have to find a contractor for each job, but you may have to find several before you get one that is a good fit.
On top of that, you have very little way of knowing if you are being charged a fair rate, and have to rely on contractors to be fair and honest with you. That’s why more and more property managers are turning to apps like AllBetter to make the process smooth and simple. By placing work into the hands of a proven professional, like Sayan Renovation and Construction, you can guarantee you are getting the best work at the best rate, every time.
5. Finding the Right Tenants
Before you can worry about retaining your best tenants, you first have to find them. Not everyone is good tenant material, so all prospective tenants need to be vetted. The classic method for vetting tenants using credit checks and bank statements only tells you if they can pay rent, not if they are obnoxious, loud, or disrespectful of other tenants and shared spaces.
There is nothing worse than a bad tenant. Unfortunately, they are easier to get in than they are to get out. Thankfully though, there are a growing number of options for landlords and property managers to lookup tenant histories. These websites and apps let you ensure that not only are they able to pay, but also that they won’t come with a host of other issues.
6. Collecting Rent
When you think about collecting rent as a pain point, you probably think about people not paying their rent or late payments. While that is an issue, just the actual process of collecting and processing rent payments can be a huge time drain. This is particularly true if you are working with an outdated system or, even worse, collecting actual checks!
Thankfully, this is one of the easiest problems on this list to solve. Chasing tenants to collect rent checks and depositing them at the bank is a thing of the past. There are many great options available to property managers to automate their rent collection. Services allow tenants to pay online, saving you and them time and effort.
Summary
Ultimately, good property management is all about getting the right tenants, keeping them happy, and minimizing your costs along the way. While it may sound simple, as we’ve shown above, there are plenty of little obstacles that can quickly snowball. The easiest thing that property managers can do to begin to alleviate these pain points is to leverage technology to automate and manage their activities.
There is a wide range of solutions out there that tackle these problems so that you don’t have to. So, stop working hard and start working smart. The less time you are spending on each of these pain points, the more time you can spend on keeping your tenants happy and maximizing ROI for you and your clients.
If you are looking to improve your property, connect with us today and see how we can help. Sayan has an experienced crew that can handle all of your construction & renovation needs. Send us a message or give us a call at (972) 428-7100.
