What Makes A Good Residential Property Manager?

Syracuse, NY Property Management Companies

Avoid Weekend Warrior Property Managers

It seems the world of what some may call “property managers” is becoming flooded with individuals who think managing your property and essentially your passive income stream is an easy task where they can sit back and collect monthly fees without providing much if any benefit to the property owner. If you’re an experienced investor then you have probably already experienced some of these bad rental property management companies. Well, I’m here to tell you how we do things, what our qualifications are and what you should be looking for in a residential property management company.

There are three major pillars that you should be looking for in a property management company and they’re all about experience.

Property Management Experience

Property management is not as easy or as simple as it may seem. There are a lot of moving parts, a lot of moving parts that you as a landlord are not interested in being involved in anymore. Real Estate investors are intelligent individuals and often times they enter into the REI world in search of secondary or income streams initially and then if things go well for the investor, potentially a full time switch to investing and if you’re a buy and hold investor then at some point you’re going to want to focus on finding deals, closing deals, and enjoying your passive incomes streams.

The best way to do this is to make sure that the property management company you hire has EXPERIENCE. Before our company, Universal entered the residential property management game; we were managing hundreds of properties all over NY state, the caveat being we managed distressed properties, foreclosures, probates, massive portfolios purchased by multi-million dollar hedge funds. What do you and I know about “distressed” properties? They’re typically un-maintained, deferred maintenance, code violations, tax problems, frozen plumbing, thefts, vandalism, securing problems. Those are the problems we dealt with on a daily basis to the tune of millions of dollars a year in revenue for our company and sub-contractors.

The issues we handled on a daily basis, are issues that a typical property manager may only see once a year. Working with these massive companies and investment firms has additional requires, strict guidelines that are to be followed. All of our in-field and office staff have extensive knowledge and relationships with town ships, code officers, listing agents, brokers, contractors, and other investors. As the economy recovered, the ability to buy massive portfolios of distressed properties dwindled and we shifted our focus towards residential management and construction to the open world. We still currently manage approximately 300 distressed properties in the Syracuse, NY area.

Real Estate Experience

Alright so we have established what kind of experience is necessary for your property manager to have in regards to actually being a property manager so let’s get into the real estate experience. At some point in the life of you owning your buy and hold, there will be a vacancy. The best way to minimize the length of the vacancy and increase your rental rates is through experience in real estate marketing. This comes in many forms; knowing the local area and what appeals to those looking for a rental in the properties location, highlighting key features of the home, excellent photos to go along with a well written ad, posted to numerous social media outlets and traditional marketing outlets. I mean think about it this way, how does our website make you feel about our company? How does this blog post make you feel about our company? What about the writing style, the way this blog post in particular is organized and laid out. This is traditional marketing, mix that in with our extensive experience in real estate and it makes a pretty good little package.

If you don’t  hire us as your management company, or we don’t cover your area. Look for someone with good marketing materials, how did they find you or how did you find them? Real Estate is of course more than marketing, but when it comes to buy and hold properties; your goal should be to put an excellent tenant at the best possible rental rate that the market can bear while also minimizing the vacancy rate of the unit. We’re not talking about fix & flips right now.

Real Estate Investing Experience

Now we’ve hit a big one, if your property manager is just a real estate agent with a side gig or an accountant with a side gig, then you have failed yourself, your bank account, and your tenants. You want someone who understands what your expenses are, someone that is looking out for your best interest and someone that will make sure your cash stream is the best it can be and make sure that stream is never dammed up by evil beavers. You can read about the top 5 evil beavers here. 

We aren’t just property managers, we are investors and we have worked with other investors in all forms, as consultants, contractors, and more. We have assisted in flipping portfolios of properties all over Upstate NY, provided accurate ARV numbers, worked alongside brokers to provide the best bang for the buck remodel & rehab budgets without sacrificing quality or ROI. We flip numerous properties every year and continue to work alongside other investors providing them with off market deals, industry news, trend information, and free repair estimates to see if it’d be worth them even investing more into a property or buying a property in the first place.