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hire a property manager

Succeed as a Landlord

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succeed as a landlordIt’s not much of a secret that I am not a fan of managing my own properties. I tried it, learned a lot and then decided to leave it to the professionals. I wouldn’t say I failed miserably but I would say that I discovered that it’s not something I enjoy.

There are few things I love more than accomplishing my objectives.

When I plan my day and it goes as planned then it’s an awesome day for me. When you’re dealing with tenants you can forget about that plan! And you better believe the tenants won’t care about your final exam, your child’s soccer game or your family dinner. If their toilet is overflowing or the pilot light on the furnace went out in the freezing cold of winter then you must deal with that over everything else in your life.

That’s where I failed miserably. I wasn’t prepared for such calls and I certainly struggled with being flexible with my schedule.

Today we look for landlords like me. The tired and cranky landlord presents an enormous opportunity for a real estate investor. If you are prepared to handle the potential problems a property can have and you can spot someone who can’t then you’re quite likely to be able to pick up properties at a discount and be saving someone from an early trip to the grave.

But if you’re going to be taking over other people’s problems, and fixing them then you need to know how to succeed where the other landlord has been failing. You need to be prepared. You need to be relaxed and ready to roll with what is thrown at you.

The top five things you need to do to succeed as a landlord:

Property Repairs - Fixing a Tap1.Be Prepared: Your tenants will call you with toilet troubles, furnace issues and other maintenance requests. Unless you want to be rushing out to the property to handle every little issue it’s a good idea to find a good handyman that you can rely on. We found a great guy that lived just around the corner from the Toronto triplex I tried to manage myself. He was able to pop over in the evenings or on the weekends and check out the little issues. One time the shower was spraying everywhere. Another time the door was sticking. For a small fee he would go over and check it out, and he was almost always able to fix the problem right then and there. Without him I truly would have lost my mind. First of all, at the time the only problems I could deal with were related to toilets. I grew up in a motel and would follow Dad around as he repaired and dealt with toilet troubles in the motel rooms. But beyond basic toilet troubles, I could barely change a lightbulb at the time. Second of all, sometimes I wasn’t even in Toronto when the tenants would call so having someone nearby that could handle the call for me was critical.

If you aren’t sure how to find a good handyman, ask your neighbours. Go to the local real estate investors club meetings and ask them. Or fire up your computer and check online. We found our handyman by asking around. One of my classmates at the time had a handyman cousin the area … and that is who we ended up using.

Succeed As a Landlord2. Remember – your customer is your tenant. It’s so easy to forget that your tenant is your customer when they are calling you on Saturday night in the middle of a romantic dinner with your spouse requesting you to fix the pilot light on the furnace (this happened!).

If you owned a restaurant and someone complained about your service, if you care about your business at all, you’d listen carefully to their concerns and try to fix the issue. As a landlord you should treat your tenants with the same courtesy. Remember they probably have options and can move somewhere else. If you always remember that the tenant is your customer and that it’s your tenant paying your bills then I think that everything will be a lot easier to handle as a landlord.

3. The keys to success are in the systems you implement. Find simple systems for managing the emails, voicemails, paperwork and even the keys to the properties. A simple system for the regular things you handle as a landlord will save you time, money and stress.

Let’s take keys for example. The keys to enter each property need to be labeled and stored in an easy to use way.

I can’t take credit for this idea (I got it from Robert Elder ofQuick Start Landlord), but I can tell you that even with just a handful of properties you are going to want to pay close attention to this little trick. It will save you time and  money. The trick is to label every key with some sort of code that allows you to identify the address as well as to indicate the date.

Why? As someone who has a key to my aunt’s place, my home, my parking garage, and a friend’s place I can tell you that I already forget which key is which. If I also had to figure out which key opened which rental property I would be standing in front of a house for an hour trying to find the right key. When you add to that the fact that you’ll find yourself changing the locks on the home every few years, you could end up with dozens of keys that don’t even open any doors anymore!

And, while you’re at it, why don’t you go to your local hardware store and buy a little container that is normally used for organizing nails and screws and use it to store the keys for each of your properties? Ahhhh simplicity.

Canadian Real Estate Magazine4. Master the art of marketing. I’ve written about this over and over. In fact, in the February 2010 issue ofCanadian Real Estate Magazineyou’ll find an article I wrote on “Attracting the Best Tenants”. That article is all about marketing secrets to make your business successful at finding tenants to rent to. The bottom line is that you need to understand what the tenants in your area want. What are the features and what are the benefits of your property as they relate to the wants and needs of your tenants? This is often things like proximity to a good school, ease of access to public transportation or market specific needs like air conditioning or covered parking with plug ins for vehicles. When you understand what your tenants want you will have no problem composing compelling advertising that fills your inbox and voicemail with messages from prospective tenants.

5. Do whatever you can to reduce tenant turnover– it’s your biggest ongoing expense! Cutting corners will eventually cut your profits. If you try to show a unit without first getting it ready to be viewed, you’ll struggle to attract good tenants. In the end you’ll end up with lower rent rates and a more troublesome tenant renting from you. But the biggest thing you’ll find hurting you in the long run is tenant turnover. It’s almost always better to charge slightly lower than market rent to keep a tenant in there longer than it is to squeeze every dollar of possible rent out of the property but have tenants leaving annually. It’s also better to address tenant requests and concerns as quickly as possible. Keeping your tenants happy in their home and comfortable with you can result in loyal residents. Plus, we’ve found, our tenants are often the best source of other high quality renters. Because they are happy renting from us they tell their friends and we often get emails asking if we have any places available for rent because our current or former tenants have recommended us as landlords.

Many worn-out landlords look at their tenants as a pain in the butt. They weren’t prepared for the calls. They forget that their tenants are in fact the ones paying their bills and should be treated like the valuable customers that they are. They also don’t realize that simple systems like the one I mentioned for keys will make all the difference in streamlining and simplifying your business to make it easy. And finally, inexperienced or tired landlords probably have never taken the time to master the art of marketing to attract new tenants nor have they taken the time to try and keep the good tenants happy in their home.

If you tackle these five success secrets I am confident you’ll find yourself succeeding where other landlords have failed.

Published on February 10th, 2010

8 Ways to Know if You Should Hire a Property Manager

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8 Ways to Know if You Should Hire a Property ManagerWhen you first start shopping for a property manager you might be shocked to learn what many of them charge. We certainly were!

You’ll usually pay between 5 – 10% of your monthly rental income to a property manager plus tenant placement fees which can be as much as one months rent. The price may seem astronomical at first. It certainly eats into your positive cash flow!

When you learn the cost, the desire to manage the property yourself and save money will be powerful. Saving a few hundred dollars each month may not be worth taking on the property management yourself though! Besides the fact that a professional property manager has extensive knowledge of the local laws and regulations, they also have access to the resources required to easily manage a property.

When we first bought our Toronto tri-plex, Julie was doing her MBA and thought she could handle managing the property while she was in school (Julie is shown in the picture above painting that Toronto Tri-plex – you can tell she is loving it!). We wanted to save money, and Julie had a flexible schedule with some free time so it seemed perfect.

We went to the property and met with each tenant, introduced ourselves and made sure we had the proper signed leases in place. After that, we both figured Julie would only have to deal with minor issues as long as the property was occupied.

We were wrong! The tenant on the main floor proved to be high maintenance and called weekly about different things she wanted fixed. And then, two months into owning the property, the frequency of calls from the tenant on the main floor began to increase dramatically. She was upset because as the weather got colder, the tenant beneath her was smoking in the unit and she could smell it. Her son had asthma and this was impacting him.

Julie contacted the tenants in the basement and explained that their lease stated that there was to be no smoking in the unit and that we’d received complaints. They were polite to Julie. However, they didn’t like getting scolded and – according to the main floor tenant – started taunting her teenage son when he would come home from school. They called him a tattle tale and made him feel threatened.

It’s a long story. It dragged out for weeks, but the issues escalated. Soon the two tenants were at war and Julie was receiving 20–25 calls a day. The police were called to the scene twice by the tenants on the main floor. It was a disaster.

And as luck would have it, this was happening during Julie’s final exams! Julie was pretty close to breaking down and couldn’t just tell the tenants to wait a week until her tests were done–she had to deal with it!

Julie pretty much lost it. She’s really a no nonsense kind of person and she hated dealing with other people’s problems. Failing an exam would mean she’d have to repeat a course and that could mean an extension of her degree–which would be time consuming and expensive.

She was fit to be fried. And looking back, it should have been obvious to both of us that Julie was not well suited for the job. She is organized, efficient and focused. Sounds perfect for property management doesn’t it? Well, not exactly. Anything that throws her off what she is working on at the present moment is an annoyance for her. She also doesn’t like talking on the phone. She’d prefer never to pick up the phone at all if she could avoid it. She likes people and she likes problem solving, but she doesn’t really tolerate people who are lazy or rude. Really, she has a lot of traits that make her well suited to HIRE a property manager!

To tell if you could handle the pressures and challenges of property management you’ll want to do a little bit of a self assessment. We’ve created 8 simple questions to ask yourself to see if you think you could handle property management.

  1. Are you a reasonably tolerant person? Be honest with yourself.
  2. Do you have any knowledge and experience with doing minor maintenance and repairs?
  3. Are you able to sell and negotiate? You will have to sell the unit to renters, you’ll have to sell the idea of paying rent on time, and you will have to have the problem solving and negotiation skills of a salesperson in order to handle some of the issues that will arise.
  4. Can you visit the property on a regular basis? You should stop by at least monthly so make sure it’s convenient and possible to do so. Plus, if you do get a 3am call that requires you get there right away, are you going to be able to?
  5. Are you comfortable and capable of keeping good records? We’re a little weak at this ourselves, and we likely miss out on tax write offs because of it. It also takes us several days to prepare our books to send to our accountants each year because we aren’t as organized with our unmanaged properties as we should be.
  6. Are you able to diffuse angry individuals and ease any tensions between them? How do you handle difficult people? When dealing with a difficult person do you get angry and frustrated yourself?
  7. Imagine the busiest possible day, and then imagine having to handle a call from one of your tenants about a frozen pipe or a broken door lock. Are you going to be able to handle that situation?
  8. Do you have someone that can be your back up if you take a vacation or go out of town? If there’s an emergency at your property, your tenants need to be able to get in touch with someone that can make decisions about the property.

If you answer “no” or “I don’t know” to three or more of these questions then you should seriously consider hiring help. Property management is a job that requires expertise, skills and resources. It’s possible to do it part time while working a full time job, but there will be days where it’s not easy.

These questions are not exhaustive. There are other things to consider when you make the decision whether to hire a professional or not, but spending a bit of time honestly answering these questions will really help you figure out if you want to be your own property manager. You may find the cost of a professional is worth every penny.

 

Five Ways to Protect Yourself from a Bad Property Manager

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We’re not too proud to say we made gigantic mistakes when we hired property managers for our Toronto and Niagara Falls properties. Our biggest errors happened before we even bought the properties, but we continued to make them until one day Dave was reading his name in the paper, calling him “an absentee landlord of a local crack house”, and we were making the discovery that our other property manager was robbing rent money from us.

When we realized what had happened in both situations we really felt stupid. And, financially both situations were painful. In fact, five years later, we’re still dealing with problems that arose because of the bad Niagara Falls property manager.

Mistake Number One: Dave bought (I take no responsibility for what he did with the two Niagara Falls properties) without making sure he could hire a reputable management company. Living two hours away, it was impossible for him to manage the property and he had to hire the only person that would take it on.

Avoid this mistake: Before you buy a property, make sure you are able to hire a good property management firm. There are some properties that good property managers will not manage. And if they won’t manage them, there’s a good chance they are more work then they are worth.

Mistake Number Two: When we hired the property manager for our Toronto property, we focused our research on finding the best priced manager. We glanced at references, made sure the company was registered with the better business bureau and that was about it. We were just anxious to not have to deal with the tenants that were fighting and calling us 20 times a day.

Avoid this mistake: Research your potential property manager obsessively. When you’ve found a firm that you think you’d like to hire, get references and find out what other properties they manage. Drive by those properties and see how well they are maintained. Take a walk around and hope to bump into a tenant. See if the tenant is happy with the property management company. And definitely call a few of the owners of these properties the company manages and find out if they would recommend the company.

Mistake Number Three: Once we hired the property manager in Toronto, we washed our hands of it. Grateful not to be dealing with the tenants fighting, we happily stopped thinking about it.

Avoid this mistake: To start with, frequently contact your property management company. And, once in awhile check in with your tenants. Let the property manager know you are keeping in touch with the tenants and checking the property yourself on occasion. Ensuring the property manager knows you’re involved and that he’s accountable will keep him on his toes.

Mistake Number Four: Ignoring a unit that is always vacant. In Niagara Falls there was one unit we never collected rent for. When Dave checked on it, it seemed someone was living there. Turns out the property manager was letting a buddy crash there for free. This buddy attracted working girls and drugs to the building with a greater frequency than the other tenants. So not only was he freeloading, he was bringing the property down with him.

Avoid this mistake: If there is one unit that always seems to be vacant, check on it. Visit the unit or have someone else visit for you. Confirm that it is vacant. If someone is living there, you want to find out why you aren’t getting rent for it. And if it is really vacant, you need to see it yourself to find out why and fix the problem.

Mistake Number Five: While we never did prove it, we’re certain that the same manager that robbed rent money from us (See our story on what happened) also charged us for repairs to the property that never were done. Anything to scam a few extra bucks from the unsuspecting owners.

Avoid this mistake: If you are being charged for snow removal, check the weather history and make sure it actually snowed that day. If you are being charged for repairs, get receipts or photographs of the repairs. One tip that David Lindahl had in his book “Emerging Real Estate Markets” was to have the management company take a picture of the repair with the local newspaper next to it. This way he has proof of the date, and he can see what the repair actually was. It prevents being charged for the same repair twice.

We’ve learned a healthy dose of paranoia goes a long ways. So trust your instincts, but check them too. A few extra phone calls and a few extra steps here and there can save you thousands of dollars a year.

Published April 5, 2008

April 21st, 2008 UPDATE

After we published this article, we received an email from our Nanaimo property manager. He had a great suggestion regarding our advice to check in with your tenants to ensure your property manager is doing what you hired them to do:

I caution all new clients not to contact their tenants direct under any circumstances! I have many tales of woe on this and not one where there was a benefit. The few that disregarded my advice were quick to ask me how to get out of the problems contacting the tenants had created.

The property manager is the middleman and frequently the “no” man. If the tenant has the owner’s contact info they will not take no for an answer. (Then it becomes a “he said, she said” game.) It is amazing what a tenant or an owner thinks the other promised and I have no way to guess the real story which may be somewhere in between. Why open up that can of worms?

I suggest making an appointment to view the home with the three parties in attendance. You get to know each other and the property but keep your comments to the weather. The meeting is warm and fuzzy.

When we received LW’s email, all of the memories of a disgruntled tenant that found Dave’s phone number through information came rushing back to us. Being in B.C. and three hours behind Ontario’s time zone where the tenant lived, we found ourselves getting really unpleasant 5am wake up calls on many mornings. We really like LW’s suggestion, and believe that a meeting with all three parties in attendance would keep the property manager in the middle, where they should be, while providing an owner with the necessary reassurance that the property manager is doing the job they’ve been hired to do.

So thank you LW for your great feedback. Keep it coming!

 

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