Tenant maintenance

Tenant maintenance property management issues

When managing multiple rental properties it is important to deal with all property management issues in an efficient manner. If you manage a portfolio of 50 rental units you will be dealing with a considerable amount of potential property management issues within the month. Remember, tenants can ring at any time and depending on the urgency of the matter you could receive calls out of hours. I am sure any experienced property manager has received the phone call whilst sitting down to dinner from  over excited tenants who have lost their keys or their alarm is howling.

Make sure you have tenant maintenance procedures in place

 original author: epSos.de

 Acknowledge the issue with a prompt reply

1^st tip is to acknowledge the issue with a prompt reply to the tenant to ascertain that you have all the correct information.Once you have noted all of the information from the tenant, inform the tenant that you will update the landlord. Depending on the relationship you have with your landlord or the agreement you have in place, you may be able to make property management decisions without your landlord’s permissions. Most letting agencies have an agreement with landlords that any property management issues costing under £200 can be overseen by the agent. If this is the case make sure that you have this covered in your agreement with your landlord before proceeding.

Contact tradesmen immediately

2^nd  tip is to get onto your handyman or tradesmen immediately to organise a time to fix the problem. Remember some tradesmen will be busy working on different jobs and could possibly let you down at the last minute. It is always useful to have a backup tradesmen you know who could possible give you credit until the rent is collected. If you are a more established letting agent you may employ your own tradesmen or contractors so you will know how efficiently they normally operate.

Non emergency property management issues

3^rd tip is to aim for a 24 hour turn around for non emergency property management issues. This is a must to avoid disgruntled tenants from burning your ears by talking about you in a negative way or somehow getting in touch with the landlord. For emergencies, obviously the problem needs to be solved immediately and would most likely involve you visiting the property to deal with the issue head on!

Sure isn’t that why the landlord pays you to manage the property! 

Tenant maintenance

Some of the common issues tenants will have:

• -          Plumbing problems
• -          Electric problems
• -          Lost keys
• -          Complaints from neighbours
• -          Parties in the neighbouring property
• -          Washing machine is broken
• -          Fridge is broken
• -          Faulty alarm or forgotten alarm code
• -          Shower pump gone down

by Colin Napper

Articles of interest

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Questions to ask tenants

Link building strategies

Link building for your letting agency website is crucial in order for your site to get listed high on organic search results. In a previous post we discussed The biggest challenge letting agents face today which was winning new properties to let and manage. We then went on to discuss how to win more landlords with a posting on marketing to landlords in 5 Steps. 

With so many letting agency websites to compete with it has become essential for you to put an SEO strategy into place. 

Link Building strategies

One way search engines rank your website higher against others is by how many times your website gets mentioned on the internet. This term is simply called “inbound links”. The more websites that mention your website the higher search engines rank your own website (Page Rank). Page rank is important as the higher a websites page ranks the higher amount of credibility it gives to its link to you (Link Juice). If you are going to start to build links you need to research link building strategies.

A tool you can easily use in your toolbar to see what page rank a website has is available on Google Chrome

A really quick way to find out how many links you currently have going to your site can be found by visiting Alexa. Enter your site url and it will return a link with your number of links. 

A useful exercise is to check up with a number of your competitors and see how they are doing. Through some research you could possibly find some websites that can give you some really strong links. 

Probably one of the best articles I have ever come across with regards to Link building strategies is written by Jon Cooper. If there is ever a document I would recommend reading it is this one… by the way its free and I did not write it so there is no catch ;-)

We would be delighted to hear how you get on with your backlinks strategy. Please feel free to comment.

by Andreas Riha