What Is Their Portfolio Like?
If you have a variety of single family investment properties, you
should probably look for a property management company with particular
experience in single-family homes. Likewise, for a series of
multi-family investment properties look for companies that manage
multi-family investment properties as a specialty.
The cost you're paying for is not just a reduction in your own
day-to-day activity with an investment property but also is payment
for the expertise of a property management company. Make sure that the
expertise you're paying for has been honed on the type of property
you're looking to get management services for.
What Is Your Role?
Many property management companies will have a threshold for spending
that requires your approval. This is often negotiable if you want to
further lessen your involvement in the process. For those that want to
have as big a hands-off approach as possible, look for organizations
that thrive on taking the reigns of a property fully from the property
owner. Do they provide status reports? What is their communication
plan like? These are prime questions to ask if minimizing your
involvement in the day-to-day operations of your investment property
is a chief concern.
What kind of role do you have to play in new rentals? Much of the
time, rental property management companies will take on all of the
tasks needed to put a new renter in your property. However, it is
worth asking the question to determine what kind of time turn around
you can expect in getting a new tenant in and seeing just what kind of
effort you have to put forth to ease that process.
Rental property investment is a large time and effort commitment but
after selecting your investment, rental property management companies
can take some of that time and effort out of your hands. In
determining whether that time and effort savings is worth the cost
expense, it is important to ask some of these questions.
Rental property management is not for everyone, so make sure that you
are comfortable with what will be expected of you and what you will be
expected to give up before committing to any kind of long-term
agreement.