7 Nightmares of Property Managers and Home Owners
If you are a property manager or own a home that is used as a rental, you probably have experienced a few of your own. We scoured the internet to find a few stories to share from some people just like you (because everything on the internet is true, right?). Enjoy!
1. I started managing my own properties with some help because most property management companies I hired weren’t notifying me of the problems, and I could use the extra cash flow I saved. The problem now is managing my time so I can help my residents. I’m literally waking up in the night dreaming about confrontations with my residents.
2. Nine times out of ten the professional property management companies I’ve worked with never inspected the properties for maintenance! I was stuck with awful tenants in run-down places I didn’t know were full of roaches and bed bugs. I was through only getting 20% of the profits because the companies were simply making calls, collecting my rent, and putting paper notices on doors. Now for my long-distance properties, I request I’m always notified of problems.
3. It can feel like property managers have different goals than mine. These companies make more money if a resident doesn’t pay their rent or renew because they get another fee. They’ll collect as many fees as they want but there’s no incentive for them to collect on time-or try to make the residents as satisfied with my property as I’d wish.
4. I’m in over my head. My first mistake was not looking for a quality property manager and settled on some nice local people close to where I lived. For a while we thought everything was okay because we weren’t getting emails, calls, or notices about concerns or even updates about when rent had been paid, we’d just get payments periodically with a small complaint here and there. Well over the course of a few years the property manager kept complaining about how awful certain residents were about paying their rent on time, or “annoying” concerns the residents had of their own with the rental property. It was a hypocritical situation because the property manager was never prompt with the payments to me and I eventually had enough and replaced her. The only problem is trying to transition to someone new because she is upset with me and hasn’t sent us paperwork about maintenance, rent statements, and the status of our residents. We just know a few have changed locks, a house has sewer gas coming into the home, and any vendors we send see our damaged reputation.
5. One of my “residents” wasn’t really a resident I knew of. His mother was renting the place in her name for reasons I don’t know. One day the guy got blackout drunk, bumped the gas stove and accidentally turned it on before passing out. Someone else in the building smelled it and then called the utility company. That led to the entire building’s gas being turned off which was a nightmare of its own. Thankfully everyone was okay in the end, it was just a stressful process to handle it.
6. You would think it would be easy to give an eviction notice to someone in jail… A resident became violent after a holiday party and broke out all the windows on the property. The windows and the resident were replaced.
7. I inherited so many crazy residents when I bought some properties too good to be true. The landlord would say “They’re all great residents.” “Everyone pays on time” “I have no problems at all, just looking to retire.” Yeah, not so much. The people I ended up having to deal with was a woman shooting a pistol out her back window “for fun,” a man who would regularly wake the neighbors by waking in the night screaming, and a resident that didn’t want to bother me or the property manager when the heater went out and instead used the stove.
Have a story you would like to share? We would love to hear about it.