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 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 eat up approximately 10% of your monthly rental income. They also consume valuable time. Property managers are forced to search for contractors, plan maintenance schedules, and supervise work when necessary. Thankfully, apps and services can make organizing and managing maintenance and repair much smoother. Property managers must 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 much easier.
2. Tenant Retention
In today’s competitive rental market, retaining tenants, particularly the good ones, are 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 more options will be 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 must know 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 manager’s time. Property managers are busy processing service requests, managing rental payments, contracting, and more. For those managing multiple properties themselves, this can quickly become 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. Busy property managers need to hire trustworthy people 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 massive 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 a minimal 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 get 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 to get out. Thankfully though, there are a growing number of options for landlords and property managers to look up tenant histories. These websites and apps let you ensure that they are able to pay and 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, 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 most straightforward problems on this list to solve. Chasing tenants to collect rent checks and depositing them at the bank is a thing of the past. Many great options are 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 shown above, plenty of little obstacles can quickly snowball. The easiest thing that property managers can do to alleviate these pain points is to leverage technology to automate and manage their activities.
A wide range of solutions tackles these problems so you don’t have to. So, stop working hard and start working smart. The less time you spend on each of these pain points, the more time you can spend keeping your tenants happy and maximizing ROI for you and your clients.
If you want 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 call us at (972) 428-7100.
