Is Property Management going to the way of gas stations?

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Permalink Reply by Dennis Schroader on September 22, 2010 at 10:17am

Hi Nate.

I read your blog post and joined the LinkedIn group.

I think changing technology and customer expectations (both owners and tenants) will drive changes in the way we operate.

I used to offer a mix of full and lease up only services to owners. I stopped doing the lease up only service a couple years ago because the expectations of tenants that they would be treated with respect and courtesy, and their maintenance requests would be promptly addressed were not being met by the owners. It reflected badly upon me and those tenants that were unhappy were all too eager to tell their frineds to not rent through us. Perhaps there is a way for me to divorce myself and my company from that stigma, but I have not found it yet.

I serve primarily a military population as both owners and renters. Because they are not local, almost none of my owners has an interest in doing any work themselves. If my business was more focused on a segment of the population that had longer average local residency, I might have more of a need to accomodate an owner who wants to do more work themselves.

I am concerned with owners who want to do the repair work themselves to save money. I find that the one owner I have who really wants to do this has done work in the home in the past that was not to code and is now causing much more extensive and expensive repairs to be done. I can see some potential liability issues if I know that this kind of work is being done and continue as property manager.

As far as technology driving change is concerned, I know the number and level of detail expected in photos, both for marketing and for assessing a property's condition, continues to increase. Potential tenants always want more photos and so do owners. I am thinking of migrating to video for a lot of this as well. Both require new skill sets that we did not have to have before; require a lot more digital storage and protocols for filing and backup.

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