Is Hiring A Property Management Company Right For You?
The Pros & Cons Of Hiring A Property Management Company
Are you a landlord wondering if it makes more sense to manage your own properties or to outsource them to a property management company? In this video, I’m going to walk you through the pros and cons of hiring a property management company versus managing your property yourself. Whether you’re looking to alleviate stress or free up your time, I’ll help you decide what’s best for you and your situation.
Why Hire A Property Management Company?
The only reason people hire property management companies like us is they don’t have the patience or the time to manage their properties themselves. Owning rental properties is a great way to build wealth, but it can cause a lot of stress and take up a lot of time. It’s important that you run your rental properties like a business—because that’s exactly what it is. What’s best for you, of course, is going to depend specifically on your situation.
Managing Maintenance
A big factor you’ll want to take into consideration is the management of the maintenance of your properties. As you know, being a landlord can come with unexpected occurrences. This can range from a call to fix a toilet or help to change a light bulb. Regardless of what that situation is, you’re always responsible for being on call as the landlord.
The main reason people outsource maintenance is that they don’t have the time or the energy to deal with maintenance requests. Additionally, as the number of properties you own increases, the headaches and phone calls will multiply as well. If you do hire us to take care of your maintenance, what you’re paying for is your time and energy. This means no more phone calls in the evenings when you’re trying to spend time with your family, no more maintenance requests on Sundays when you’re trying to watch football, and fewer headaches and less stress for you.
Rent Collections, Bookkeeping, And Accounting
The next thing you may want to take into account when considering hiring a property management company is the rent collections, bookkeeping, and overall accounting. One of the main reasons people want to outsource this is because if they’re not a mathematician. It can be a lot of work to chase after tenants to collect rents, and enforcing an eviction process takes a lot of time.
On top of that, there are the expenses for your maintenance requests, paying your property taxes, and all the miscellaneous costs that pop up along the way. Working with a property management company can make receiving your rent payments each month very simple. For example, tenants have the option to pay their rents online through their online tenant portal. If they prefer to pay in cash, we have various locations throughout the areas we manage where tenants can drop off their rent payments.
Working with a property management company also keeps your books legal. Let me give you an example. If you’re not holding your security deposits in separate interest-bearing accounts, you’re doing it illegally. It’s our job to make sure that we stay on top of that on your behalf. Managing the books for one or two properties may not be a full-time job, but it easily can be once you start adding more properties.
Landlord-Tenant Relationship
The last reason we see a lot of landlords outsourcing property management is for the overall landlord-tenant relationship. One of the worst things that can happen to you as a landlord is having a bad or non-paying tenant. We like to avoid that by doing the proper tenant screening upfront. This includes checking their credit—not once, but twice—verifying their employment, staying fair housing compliant, and enforcing the clause in the lease for late payments and damages.
Is Property Management Right For You?
I hope this outlined some of the reasons why property owners decide to hire property management companies. If the stress of managing your properties on your own doesn’t affect you, then maybe it’s not for you. But if that stress does weigh on you, then hiring a property management company like us to take care of these things for you make sense.
There are many property management companies out there who you can hire, but the main difference is who you work with. At Capitol Street Management, we have a few different options that you can choose from. You can take a more hands-off approach—where we handle everything for you—or you can choose a hands-on approach, where we can figure out exactly what you want us to take off of your plate. So if you’re considering hiring a property management company to take care of any of your property management needs, we would love to speak with you. Feel free to reach out to us and we’d be happy to connect!
