If you’re a real estate investor, managing your own rental property can seem like the best option. You get to pocket all of your rental income rather than spending money on management fees and can also stay personally involved in every aspect of your investment.
But here’s the kicker. While going the DIY management route might seem like it’s helping you conserve resources, many property owners come to a realization that working with a professional property management company can help them save more money even after the monthly management fees. Not convinced? Just consider these three factors:
1. Property managers help landlords continue to invest
It’s not just a cliche – time really is money. After your investment, if you, as an owner, end up spending large amounts of time dealing with maintenance calls, filling vacancies, or collecting rent, you’ve turned into a landlord and may find it difficult to carve out time to focus on growing your portfolio. If you want to maximize your monthly rental investment income, you need to outsource those property management responsibilities to a professional who’s had experience doing exactly that.
Let someone else handle the repetitive tasks of managing your property and conserve your own time and energy for other high-value work. This is why CEOs get executive assistants! Delegating responsibilities will allow you to keep growing your investment portfolio and building your passive income.
2. Property managers get you better service rates
Imagine that you’re self-managing a rental property and a tenant calls you with a complaint. There’s no hot water in their unit. After investigating, you realize the building’s water heater is completely shot and will need to be replaced. What do you do?
If you’re like most landlords, you don’t have much of a choice. You buy a new water heater at standard retail price and have a service professional install it. You see the invoice and it makes you balk.
With a professional property management company like Great Jones, it’s a different story. With property management in Columbia, SC to Memphis, TN, we partner with a local network of top-rated service professionals and pre-negotiate wholesale rates. Great Jones constantly evaluates and adds new vendors to our local networks to make sure every vendor is responsive, reliable, and efficient. We never mark up your parts or labor costs. A single HVAC replacement can be up to $2000 less than what you might pay on your own at standard market rates.
3. Property managers find the right tenants
For investors that manage their rentals themselves, filling vacancies is also a huge drain on resources. You have to market and advertise your rental property, run background checks, and inspect the unit, all while hoping to fill the empty rental as quickly as possible. After all, every vacancy is lost rental income that you’re bleeding away. Not to mention that finding a tenant may only be half the battle. If they don’t treat your home lovingly, are frequently late on rent, or leave early and break the lease, you can end up losing even more money.
A professional property manager solves all of these problems on your behalf. Since they handle tenant placement, property management companies have the resources and the skills to place high-quality long term tenants for you. Great Jones, for instance, runs a thorough background and credit check, which includes reviewing any criminal records and problems with previous landlords. We run sophisticated algorithms against our huge resident database to find the perfect resident for you – tenants who will pay rent promptly and stay for as long as possible.
To date, Great Jones has had a zero percent rent delinquency rate on tenants we place. Since we take a small fee only when the homeowner is collecting paid rent, we have a financial incentive to keep your vacancy rate as low as possible. That’s the kind of win-win partnership you buy into when you hire a professional property management service.
If there’s one task many new real estate investors underestimate, it’s service and maintenance.
Owning rental property can feel a bit like treading water. There’s always a jammed lock, a blocked drain, a crack in the drywall, or a leaky pipe. And that’s just for emergency repairs. There are also routine maintenance responsibilities like leaf, litter, or snow removal, pool and gym maintenance, boiler and ductwork cleaning, roof resurfacing, and so on. Staying on top of all this is a full-time job – but it doesn’t have to be your full-time job.
When you work with a professional manager, you’re paying someone to manage these tasks for you. When a toilet overflows, someone else’s phone rings at 2 AM, rather than yours. The best management companies will keep you in the loop while keeping you above the fray of daily operations. It’s a way of protecting your tenant relationships and staying in good standing with the law. It allows you to sit back with peace of mind and enjoy the fruits of your investment.
To learn more or get started with Great Jones, click here.
