5 Essential Tips for Managing Your Own Property

Published On: June 16th, 2021

If you’re like many people, you know that managing your own property is tough – and you may even want to sell your property rather than working as a landlord. However, if you find yourself in the position of managing your own property, these five tips can make it easier on you.

5 Essential Tips for Managing Your Own Property

Whether you’re brand-new at managing your own property or you’ve been doing it for a while and feel a bit overwhelmed, these five tips can help you be more successful:

Focus on the long-term
Inspect your property regularly
Communicate in writing every time
Set up processes
Outsource the things you don’t want to do yourself

Here’s a closer look at each.

Property Management Tip #1: Focus on the long-term

Remember that your property is generating income for you – even if it’s not as much as you’d like. Because it’s your income-generator, it’s essential that you care for it properly. And if you intend to keep your property, it’s in your best interest to nurture good relationships with your tenants. Likewise, if you have bad tenants, it’s okay to decline to renew their lease; at best, bad tenants can cause good tenants in a multifamily property to move out, and at worst, they can cost you a lot of money in damages.

Property Management Tip #2. Inspect your property regularly

If it’s been more than six months since you last visited your property, it’s time to schedule a check-in. You want to ensure that your current tenants are properly caring for the home and that they don’t need any maintenance or repairs that they’ve neglected to tell you about. (In the worst-case scenario, something like this could happen.)

Property Management Tip #3: Communicate in writing every time

All the communication you have with your tenants should be in writing – and if you talk over the phone, send a “recap” email to outline everything you’ve discussed. That way, you have a written record in case you need to use it to protect yourself later.

Property Management Tip #4: Set up processes

Everything that you do more than once should have a clearly defined process. For example, you should have processes in place for rent collection, maintenance requests and lease renewal. That way, you don’t have to think of things on the fly – you and your tenants will already know how things work walking into a situation, which makes things easier on everyone.

Property Management Tip #5: Outsource the things you don’t want to do yourself

Whether you love owning a rental property or you hate it, there will be things you just don’t want to do yourself. It’s always a good idea to outsource those things – even if only to save your sanity. If you hate coordinating repairs, hire someone to do it for you; if you don’t want to interview prospective tenants, find someone you can pay to do a good job at it.

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