landlords and tenants

Tenant maintenance – Top Tips

Posted on May 22, 2013 Written by Colin Napper 1 Comment

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 call 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 that phone call whilst sitting down to dinner, from over-excited tenants who have lost their keys or set off their alarm.

Make sure you have tenant maintenance procedures in place

tenant maintenance

Credit Image: epSos.de

1. Acknowledge the issue with a prompt reply

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 permission. 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.

2. Contact tradesmen immediately

Get onto your handyman or tradesperson immediately to organise a time to fix the problem. Remember some tradespersons 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 tradespersons or contractors, so you will know how efficiently they normally operate.

3. Non-emergency property management issues

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

The list can go on with many more issues ultimately its how you deal with your tenant maintenance requests that make you a good property manager. Some agencies use task manager software to help them.

by Colin Napper

Articles of interest

Management of communication

Questions to ask tenants

Creating your YouTube channel

Posted on April 5, 2013 Written by Colin Napper Leave a Comment

In our previous blog, Why use YouTube for marketing, we discussed the benefits of using rental marketing videos for your letting agency.

Creating your YouTube channel

So the first step in rental marketing videos is setting up a channel to host the videos. There are a number of video hosting platforms but we have used the most popular, YouTube. In this demonstration, I am going to go through creating your YouTube channel.

When creating your YouTube channel it is very important to keep SEO in mind, as this is really going to help the channel to get traffic. If you didnt know already, YouTube is owned by Google, so by using SEO with your brand’s keywords and marketing message in your YouTube profile, you are feeding Google’s search appetite.

Below is a video blog showing how to do this and here is a link to the YouTube channel I just created: Letting Agent UK

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsZckmGYfU8

Creating your Letting agency video channel (by Rentviewsoftware)

by Andreas Riha

Questions to ask tenants my top 10

Posted on March 12, 2013 Written by Andreas Riha Leave a Comment

Interviewing questions to ask tenants

The property has been painted, advertised, shown and now you have a couple of different sets of tenants that have expressed interest in taking the property. So you think you have all the hard work done in finding a tenant for your property. Well that would be correct now you just have to make sure that the tenants you select are the right tenants.

Here is a list of 10 questions to allow you understand what your tenants are.

Questions to ask tenants

1. Why are you moving?

It is a straight forward question which should give you the answers you need. This is a great opening question to ask tenants. The type of answers will be varied but typically- because of my job, looking for more room, prefer this location, lease expired etc. The information you are asking here should match with the references.

First Time Renter -If a tenant has not rented in the past it will be your choice to proceed or not. Every tenant has to start somewhere and just because they have not rented before doesn’t mean they will be bad tenants. Make sure to confirm this later by asking for a current bank statement.

2. When are you looking to move?

This is obviously important for you as the sooner you will have it rented the sooner you have revenue coming in on the property. Whilst it is always ideal for a tenant to say tomorrow or ASAP make sure you ask follow up questions. How come your looking to move so quickly? There could be a genuine reason behind this and depending on where your property is located the availability might be tight so they could be looking for some time. What you want to do here is see if the tenants story is all coming together on what they have said already.

3. How many people is in the group?

Just because a set of two tenants come to view the property it doesn’t mean that they will be the only ones living there. You really need to ask this question and back it up by saying it is important for the insurance on the property and it states in the lease that only the named people on the lease can live there. Tell tale signs of potentially extra tenants are 2 people expressing interest for a 3 bedroom property etc.

4. What is the total income of the tenants?

This for some can be a difficult question to ask and some tenants might get bothered by you asking it. It is a very important question, just like you get asked about what your salary is before getting a loan. The tenant needs to confirm they have the ability to pay what the rent is every month. Financial experts suggest that a maximum of 35% of your salary should go on rent. So if a set of tenants are on minimum wage they have a Gross salary of around £2,500 so there maximum rent should be £875 per month. A copy of a bank statement should confirm all of this.

tenant questions

5. Has the tenant got a months rent and deposit in advance.

I would highly recommend getting this from any possible tenant. If the tenant is unable to outlay this then I would ask questions on whether they are the right tenants for your property. If there are any doubts that the tenants are unable to hand this over on the move in date the likely hood is that this could be the same with the rent in the future.

6. How long of a lease are they looking for?

I would suggest here that a 6 month AST lease is the preferred option. If a tenant says anything to suggest that 6 months is to long of a lease period to commit to walk away. Tenants can say things like “I want to run the lease in line with my work contract which I only have 3 months left of but I would be certain it will be renewed”. It seems reasonable but if it doesn’t you are going to go through this whole renting process again in 3 months.

7. That the tenant is happy to rent as is

Having a tenant to move into a property and ask on the lease signing day for a new bed, sofa, wooden floors etc can get things off to a bad start. This can especially be the case if you have kept the property vacant for a couple of weeks for the tenant. It is going to a financial burden for you to say no and look for a new set of tenants. The best thing to do is ask if the tenant is happy with everything and if not to let you know now. If a tenant finds out the washing machine is broke after a week that is fine but wanting a new one because it has not a large enough drum is a problem.

8. Rental References

This is very important and although you might you a good ability to read peoples character I would highly recommend backing up the conversation to date with references.

Work reference– A letter to confirm the tenant is currently employed by the company and a name and contact number to confirm. Do not be too worried about full time permanent as a lot of companies do not offer this and prefer 11 month renewable contracts.

Landlord reference – Preferably with a land line to confirm the tenancy with the landlord.

This blog posting on rental references checking might also interest you

Utilities with previous address – This is a good way to confirm the previous address and is essential for a tenant stating it is the first time renting.

Bank Statement – This should confirm the tenant’s ability to pay as it would be best to set up a standing order for rent. It can be used as a utility also but preferably as a separate document.

I.D- Copy of valid Passport or Driving license as a preference

National Insurance number- To confirm the identity and also needed for the PRTB registration.

9. Any Pets or Do you smoke

Might well seem like obvious questions to ask tenants but I would highly recommend asking them. I have personally seen many leases end due to the above. Some tenants may think its fine to have a pet dog or to smoke in the kitchen of the property. If this is out of bounds for your property make sure to ask.

10. And lastly…Any questions

This simple question could unearth a reason that this property might not suit this tenant which they may not realise until they move in.

After all of these questions hopefully you have a better understanding or your new potential tenants and which one suits your property best. If a potential set of tenants do not suit your property you need to walk away as having a tenant in which doesn’t suit can be very costly, stressful and time consuming. I hope this has been helpful for you. If you feel I have left something out in my questions to ask tenants please let me know

by Andreas Riha

Management of communication

Posted on March 11, 2013 Written by Colin Napper Leave a Comment

Good communication between your Letting Agency, your Landlords and Tenants is a vital tool in keeping your customers happy and retaining them going forward. The office phone will usually start ringing from 9am until 5pm with numerous queries or information from tenants and landlords; where is this month’s rent? Can I have a breakdown of my accounts? There is a problem with my washing machine! The radiator in the main bedroom doesn’t work!

If you manage rental properties you will surely have heard some of these topics or issues arise from landlords and tenants. The problem today is there are too many ways of communicating issues or problems into your office and the information can get lost if you don’t set down some rules or guidelines.

I list below some of the main communication channels used by landlords and tenants when contacting you or your office.

Management of Communication

via Telephone

The trusty telephone is still the number one way landlords and tenants will communicate with letting agents and property managers. If you use this as your main point of contact for your customers, expect to get a deluge of messages come Monday morning on rent and property management issues. Depending on the size of your rental management portfolio you may need to hire a receptionist to take care of the queries coming in.

via Email

This is a very popular and a preferred way for some agencies to communicate with customers, especially with landlords who may be in a different time zone. With access to Smartphones, it is easier than ever to communicate with tenants and landlords and you can sync your work email up to your Smartphone easily. The downside is, you may never be off work with emails popping up frequently, and the communications never stop. The main danger here is that if you get an email in the night time, come the start of the next working day, you may have forgotten to act upon it.

via Text

Text message is another way of communication management used and sometimes preferred by your customers. It is usually used in non-urgent situations by tenants looking to rent a property or to alert property managers to issues within the property. Tenants along with potential tenants who have poor oral English will send a text as they tend to be better at writing than speaking over the phone.

via Office

You will still get some landlords and tenants who will call into your office to speak to you as they prefer a more personal approach to all of this (old/new) technology stuff. The good reason for having a nice office is to be able to welcome your landlords and tenants in for a chat. If unavailable, the best approach here would be to log the issues in a diary or leave a message with the designated property manager who will deal with the query if you are not there.

via Social media

Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter could be used to communicate with your customers but should probably only be used to promote your brand or notify of an emergency or announcement. This is open for debate and some Letting Agencies may prefer to communicate with people via social media as they can be seen to be proactive at dealing with things.

via distributed messages from different communication channels

Imagine a property manager using his diary to write down a call from a landlord, communicating with a tenant via text or emailing a landlord their invoices. If your agency uses all of the above to communicate with landlords on rent and property management issues it is vital you use a good tool for the management of communication. A good CRM or online diary with a task manager is a vital tool in your armoury because your information could get lost if it is not noted down or logged.

What form of management of communication do you use in your letting agency? We would love to hear and share with other letting agents and property managers what works best for them. Let us know!

by Colin Napper