One of the biggest reasons homeowners shouldn’t manage their own rental properties is that people have a hard time with confrontation. Lots of times in property management, your tenant will come to you with a story. They’ll tell you that their car broke down and they couldn’t go to work and they had to buy a new motor, so they can’t pay the rent on time. They’ll say they are sick and had to go to the hospital or their mother just died.
Enforcing your Lease Agreement
Some of these excuses and reasons for late payment are valid. But, it puts the owner in a position of having to bend to the tenant’s will or enforce the rental contract. This is a difficult spot to be in, and it’s what you pay a property manager to handle these situations.
Conducting Routine Inspections
Another reason you shouldn’t manage your own home is that it’s very important to do routine inspections. I cannot stress this enough. At Round Table, we do drive-by inspections every eight weeks. This allows us to check the lawn and the roof. We look at the shrubs and the cars that are parked outside, and we make note of any trash and how the mailbox looks. We check it all.
We also do interior inspections every six months. If you’re a homeowner living out of town, you aren’t going to drive from Miami or Atlanta or wherever you are to check on the property. Recently, we took over the management of some properties that clearly had not been inspected in a while. One home had a wall that was infested with carpenter ants, and the tenant was a hoarder. In another property, the homeowner hadn’t screened the tenant properly, and we had to evict a renter who had 13 pit bulls tied up in the backyard.
When you have someone constantly checking on the home, these things don’t happen.
Handling Emergency Maintenance Calls
When you’re managing your own home and you get a call at 2:00 in the morning that a pipe has burst or the air conditioning isn’t working, you and your whole family will be awoken for something that an experienced property manager can easily handle.
If you have questions about managing your own home or having us manage it for you, please contact us at Round Table Property Management. We put people before property.
