What Are the Roles and Responsibilities of a Property Manager?
Find out what your property manager should be doing for you and how you should measure success.
What Does a Property Manager Do & How Can I Tell If They Are Doing a Good Job?
The old saying ‘what gets measured gets managed’ is as true for property managers as it is in any workplace. Knowing what they should be doing is the first step to managing performance, and this article aims to guide you through that process so you can judge this for yourself.
Whether you are currently with a property manager and ready to break up with your agent or simply interested in finding a software platform that can help you manage your own property, we think you’ll find registering for a demo a worthwhile exercise!
We typically look at the rental process as a cycle rather than a straight linear process. This means you don’t need to start at the beginning every time and might be in a position where you can jump-in at any stage that suits you or your current situation.
The 3 different phases we’ll cover in this article are listed below, and we’ll explore each one in more detail.
1. Match a Tenant
- Create your ad
- Manage and respond to enquiries and applications
- Schedule and host viewings
- Select a tenant
2. Manage your tenancy
- Sign the the lease agreement
- Complete a condition report
- Receive the bond
- Collect, track and receipt rent
3. Maintain your property
- Handle administration, repairs, expenses and maintenance
- Conduct routine inspections
- Report on income, expense and financial position
- Communicate on regular intervals with you and your tenant
Match a Tenant
The objective in this stage is to find a tenant for your vacant property and get them to the point where they are ready to sign a lease agreement to formalise the contract and tenancy.
The simple measures of success in this stage are time, cost and quality.
Time
Time relates to the amount of time it takes to securely place a tenant in your property to minimise the time the property is vacant. Although every property and location is slightly different, we typically operate on a rule of thumb of 2 weeks and approximately 13 enquiries from the time the listing is live.
After many years of landlords publishing thousands of rental ads on our platform each year, we typically find that 13 enquiries is a magical number at which point a lease is signed and the ad is ready to be removed from the property sites.
Cost
Cost relates to the amount spent to complete this process. You do not see individual rental properties (or properties for sale) advertised on television commercials, and that is because it is cost prohibitive to advertise on television and wouldn’t really be worth it for a rental property.
Utilising the existing property sites to get access to tenants is critical, and doing this in the most efficient way will help you save a fair amount of money. You’ll find a number of different packages on offer via the pricing page and we would typically suggest spending less than two hundred dollars to find a tenant.
You’ll notice that we offer ‘bundled’ packages which reduce the cost of ads and access to our platform which tend to be the best value and our most popular product.
Quality
Quality relates to both the level of professionalism of the individual representing you as the property manager, and also the quality of the tenant selected.
A combination of the tools and technology utilised will enable a higher level of professionalism, meaning are enquiries responded to immediately, are applications reviewed and managed well, and how efficiently a tenant can move through the stages from interest to inspecting, applying and the associated checks in the process to select the right tenant for your property.
In this stage we would typically recommend that a combination of a tenant check, verifying references and employment as well as judgement are used to make the right call.
Manage Your Tenancy
The objective in this stage is to set-up the tenancy in the correct way and ensure that you have an agreement, a baseline of the condition of the property, and funds for rent and the bond.
The simple measures of success in this stage are efficiency and effectiveness.
Efficiency
Efficiency relates to the way documents are completed and signatures collected and stored. Long gone are the days where documents were printed and there is a requirement to visit a physical address to sign documents and photo copy the outputs.
In all areas of life we have become accustomed to a digital / electronic process, and this stage of the process is no different. Are the Lease Agreement and Condition Report completed electronically?
Can the tenant pay their bond and rent via a platform with credit card or a bank account, and are the payments tracked, receipted and updated on-line so you have transparency at all times? If not, why not?
Effectiveness
Effectiveness relates to a combination of trust while ‘getting stuff done’. There is an element of timing involved here too, where the goal of this stage is to get a tenant into the property, so it can feel a bit like a transaction, but it’s critical to also keep one eye on the relationship as beyond the moment of a tenant signing a lease agreement, there will be a 6, 12 or eve 18 month lease where there will be further interaction and the relationship really matters.
A simple NPS (Net Promoter Score) for the agency or any form of customer satisfaction result can be a useful measure here, and it’s no surprise that the industry average across the real estate sector is typically quite low.
Maintain Your Property
The objective of this stage is to manage the ongoing relationship and processes associated with the property so that ‘everything is as expected’ and you have peace of mind that your investment that you have worked so hard for, is in good hands.
The simple measure of success at this stage is ‘are on track’. The lease agreement sets out a payment schedule and the dates, frequency and amount of each payment.
The condition report may have set out a schedule of fixes or repairs required, and then there will be ad-hoc requests that come through from the tenant or other parties to the property, but ultimately you want to see if the ‘plan’ is being met and manage this with minimal fuss and effort.
After all, if you’re paying a property manager you want someone that can effectively manage the tenancy and the property and not call you every time there is an issue or something comes up.
Rather, you’ll want to know, am I on track or not, and if not why not? Keeping it simple in this way means you can empower your manager to deliver and at the same time have the necessary information available to you to make decisions when required.
Need to Make a Change?
If you feel you are not getting value for money or you are paying for a property manager yet still find yourself managing your property, it’s time to make a change!
You can register for a demo of the RentBetter Platform and see how you can save money, take control of your investment property and ultimately deliver a better rental experience for both you and your tenant.
