It’s no surprise that you’re managing a rental property. Real estate investing is one of the most popular investing forms, and rental properties are a great way to grow your money. Believe it or not, 63% of people in the United States own real estate.
However, you’ll need to know how to manage tenants if you don’t want to struggle to manage your rentals.
If you’re a new property manager and have problems taking care of your rental properties, this post will help. Follow the property management tips below to take care of your properties and tenants.
Do Regular Maintenance
Even if there’s currently nothing going wrong with your properties, that doesn’t mean things aren’t wearing down. Appliances, plumbing, and electrical systems will inevitably degrade over time. The question is, will you deal with problems before they become severe or wait until something bad happens until you address issues?
It’s usually smarter to do regular maintenance on your rental properties to keep everything in good shape. Regular maintenance will help extend the life of your home’s components and make them less likely to break.
That means you’ll have happier tenants that don’t need to deal with issues. You’ll also spend less money in the long run by paying a little extra money today to handle maintenance instead of needing to replace home parts sooner than you would if you had taken better care of everything.
Master Tenant Screening
One of the keys to managing rental properties without much of a headache is finding the right people to rent your properties. You’ll hardly hear from great tenants when you find them. They’re busy living their lives and won’t need much from you to do so.
You’ll usually only hear from them when something breaks on your property.
The same isn’t true with bad tenants. They won’t do much to take care of your property and usually cause more problems. You’ll hear from them more and will have to handle more work when you have bad tenants.
Look into your current screening process to see what you can do to filter out bad tenants. There are many things you can do to increase your tenant quality beforehand. It may take more initial work, but you’ll end up with less work in the future.
Prepare the Right Lease
It’s hard for a tenant to know what they’re responsible for in a rental if you don’t tell them. You may expect them to take care of the yard, keep the home tidy, etc. However, that may not happen if you don’t lay out in writing what someone is responsible for in your home.
Having a detailed lease will take care of this issue. Layout all tenant responsibilities in the lease and ensure anyone that thinks of renting from you reads through all the details.
When you do this, there won’t be any confusion about what everyone’s responsibility is in your relationship. If a tenant doesn’t do what they’re supposed to, you can use the lease to hold them accountable.
Maintain Good Communication
Excellent communication is one of the most critical parts of being a great property manager. Tenants don’t want to wait weeks or months to hear from you to resolve issues, and if they do, you won’t keep good tenants around and will only attract low-quality tenants.
That’s why it’s crucial to figure out how to communicate well. One good way to do this is to set up a specific time during the day where you take calls. Your tenants can use this time for issues that aren’t critical.
Of course, you’ll need a way for tenants to reach you whenever they experience emergencies. Set up text messaging and email to notify you when someone needs help. Doing this will separate non-vital issues and emergencies, which will help you manage your tenant’s needs.
Build a Network of Reliable Help
You may be able to handle all the work on your home yourself at the beginning. However, that will start to change in the future as your number of rentals grows. The chances are good that you’ll spend most of your time handling home repairs instead of enjoying your rental income.
It pays to start finding reliable contractors to handle home repairs early. Start by sending a local contractor to your rental to test their abilities. If they do a great job, you can put them on a list of people to call for issues.
Doing this will help you build up a list of help. Once you finish the process, you’ll have a list of contacts to help you handle any issues you experience with your rentals.
Hire a Property Management Firm
Property management for beginners isn’t always easy. In many cases, people get in over their heads because they don’t realize how much work is involved in caring for rental homes.
In cases like this, it’s sometimes better to reach out to a property management company to handle your rentals. When you hire a management company, you don’t handle any of the hard work yourself. Your management company will handle finding tenants, repairs, tenant problems, collecting payments, and everything else involved with property management.
The good news is that fees aren’t usually bad when working with a property management firm. Most companies will charge a percentage of the rent payment as their fee. You’ll get a little less money at the end of the month, but you’ll have more free time to focus on other things that interest you.
There Are More Property Management Tips Out There
It may seem like buying rental income properties is an easy way to generate passive income, but there’s more to managing tenants than it appears. It takes work to take care of the people in your homes and keep them filled. Use the property management tips above and the others you’ll find to manage your properties successfully.
Do you want to learn more about creating a profitable real estate portfolio? Check out the blog for more real estate advice.
