Common Property Management Mistakes Part 1

Common Property Management Mistakes
When it comes to property management, it’s all too easy to make mistakes.

As your go-to property managers in Danville, we often hear people say that there’s no reason to hire a professional company to manage their property when they can do it themselves. However, as a property manager, it’s much easier than most people think to make costly mistakes that can take up an excessive amount of time and energy, open you up to liability and leave you with prohibitively expensive repairs. Here are a few common property management mistakes that hiring the right company can help you avoid:

Mistake #1. Not properly screening your tenants.
There are many aspects of managing a property that can make it more difficult than it has to be. These can include the need for frequent repairs or picky neighbors, but nothing affects the difficulty of your job as the property management more than the tenants themselves. Some tenants make your job easy: they pay their rent on time and in full every month and you hardly ever hear from them. But, others can make your job a lot more difficult, whether they are always getting noise complaints from the neighbors or you have to hunt them down every month to get their rent. By properly screening your tenants ahead of time, you can largely avoid the ones that make your job more difficult.

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Mistake #2. You use a cookie-cutter lease.
In our previous blog series, we talked about some of the biggest legal pitfalls that property managers fall into, and one of the most common has to be using a standard lease agreement. While, yes, it’s easy and convenient to print a cookie-cutter lease off of the internet, it’s not in your best interest, nor is it in the best interest of your tenants. Your lease agreement should be customized for your specific property. Otherwise, it could open you up to legal trouble down the road.

Mistake #3. You don’t hire the right contractors, or you allow your tenants to make repairs on their own.
Making sure everything in the home is in good working order is essential for many reasons: it helps you avoid liability, it protects your investment in the home and it helps to prevent unnecessary tenant turnover. When the air conditioner stops working or the water heater needs to be repaired, it’s important to hire the right contractor. If you give the tenant money to fix it themselves, or if you pick the cheapest contractor you can find to save more money, you’ll likely pay a lot more in the end than you would if you had hired the right contractor the first time.
It’s all too easy to make these common mistakes when managing a property on your own, but when you hire the right company to manage the property for you, like Stowers Real Estate, you can rest easy in knowing that you and your property are in good hands. Visit us online today to learn more, and be sure to stay tuned for our next blog to learn about more common property management mistakes.