Many investors spend a lot of effort and time researching and choosing the perfect property that will maximise their return. While this is an important part of your investment, a property manager is just as important, as they play a role in maximising the properties income and preserving the property’s capital value.
Investors may think that the role of property managers may be just to collect rent, however they forget the other responsibilities they take care of such as:
Many people will want to know how experienced a property manager is, however you shouldn’t always just look for experience, but you should look at how stable a property manager is. You want someone who will understand every aspect of your property and will pick up the phone and communicate with you on a regular basis.
While you want a property manager who is reliable and has expert knowledge in the field, you will want to first consider what your property portfolio will look like in a few years. The reason why is because some property managers may only work in a specific geographic location. Therefore, you need to consider whether you will employ a specialist property manager for each geographic area, or will you hire a large property management firm that will monitor a larger geographic area.
A property manager who decides to look after a large number of properties may indicate they are busy and they do not devote enough time to your property.
A property manager who is busy, but is able to manage your property at a high standard, and communicate on a regular basis with its landlords will take a maximum of 100 properties. Any more and the quality of management may be affected.
Most large agencies will have two departments, rental and sales department. It depends on the business owner, but the business owner will typically have experience with sales but may not have as much experience with rentals.
Therefore, they are more likely to look after the sales department and may have a property manager who purely looks after rentals. However, you may find agencies that just work with rentals and not sales and that’s where the business owner will be active in the day to day management of properties.
There are property managers all over Australia that go out to your property and say that will undertake the process of managing your property.
However, you want to hire a manager who put their time and effort to present a written application about managing the property. If they do this, they are making the effort to communicate and present their professionalism to you. This way you will know that they will operate and manage your property in a proficient manner.
If by any chance your property manager decides to hand out the keys and offer the tenant to inspect the property by themselves, then consider dropping this manager and finding a new one.
If your property manager does not conduct the right security check for your property, this could potentially mean that there will be no security once you do find tenants. Background checks will ensure you have tenants that take care of your property and pay rent on time.