How to manage your properties

How to manage your properties.
The difference between a good property investor and a great property investor is the systems they have in place to manage their properties. The management is the key area, as this is how the investments will continue to come in. Therefore how you set-up these systems and implement can be crucial to your growth in the future.

The first part in which you must focus your attention on is your tenants. A landlords dream is to have a tenant who is neat, tidy, pays the rent on time and stays in a long term arrangement. Of course given the current climate of the rental market you should have a wealth of potential tenants. If you are finding the tenant yourself you should absolutely do all the proper checks and receive all of their references. Do not take their word for it or the word of the referencer, even if they are a close friend. Renting a property is not a favour it is a business.

An ideal situation that can arise is while discussing with a potential tenant is to visit their current place of residence, not only does this give you a wonderful chance to inspect how they treat the house and their standards of living, but it also gives you the chance to inspect them as people. You are ultimately reliant on them as people to uphold their agreement to pay the rent and through personal experience a polite and courteous person is more likely to be responsible.

Another difficulty that many landlords face is finding a reliable and high quality tradesman. One way of doing this is talk to existing local contacts to get recommendations. An advantage of doing this is that you will eventually amass a big library of potential tradesman. If however you wish to establish some new contacts one tip would be to place an advertisement in a local church/temple, while less populated than previous times still can be the hub of a community.

What is also worth noting is that you should never rely on a single tradesman. Having two or more and letting them know about the others is preferable because then they know that you have options and thus will always be motivated to do a higher degree of work in the hope of attaining more future business from you. Further to this what can be an issue is when finding a high quality tradesman, is that they are remarkably busy (always take this a good sign). One way of alleviating this is when employing a high quality builder is to pay them as soon as possible (even the same day), this places the vivid impression of a reliable customer in the mind of the tradesman, and when given the choice in the future between you and another landlord who takes his time paying who do you think the tradesman will choose?

As your portfolio grows what is then the best way to manage your properties is to use a computerised system either through a dedicated software system or through a digital calender such as google calender. This way you can set it once and then leave it, thus easing any potential issues of forgetting and such.
Eventually though it is probably best practice to hire a property manager through a letting agents. When having numerous properties the sheer number of minor issues (boiler breaking, windows wont open etc etc), becomes a full time job in itself. Having someone dedicated to this can save you an enormous amount of time. This time can then be reinvested in finding more below market value properties. This also gives you the chance to diversify your portfolio by researching properties in different cities and then contacting another local letting agents to manage them. By utilising this method not only will give you this more time but it becomes an excellent networking opportunity and allows you to build more and more contacts.

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