Why A Management Fee Is An Investment Not An Expense

For this week’s property manager message, I have a special one today as this is a 9/1 turnover. This means that there are thousands of units across greater of Boston turning over. There are lots of tenants moving out with new tenants moving in, which means cleaning, as well as some repairs, as well as even maybe painting are being done within a very short time frame. That means that there’s a lot of landlords with a lot of stress going on, and as a property management company, we are supposed to help you relieve that stress. In today’s message, I’m going to be talking about how the property management and the property management fee is actually an investment, not a cost.

So let’s break down some of the ways that we actually can save you money or making more money, as well as minimize the time and headaches.

Everybody is short on time, and there’s never enough time in the day, right? However, with a property manager, you have the choice. If you hire a property manager, you can let go of all of those types of headaches and issues that you have to deal with. Your time is money. Where do you spend your time and money while you manage your property yourself?

Trying to rent out the property

You might only know the one really good agent that has helped you out in the past.

Now here’s the situation. In the past, supply and demand worked in your favor. There wasn’t as much supply, and there was high demand. Now with COVID and everything else going on, the supply is ridiculous. That means that there are tons of properties out there, and the demand for it is a lot less because there are fewer students and fewer professionals living and working in the city.

If you have an agent and that agent has an exclusive rental listing for you, he and his agents in the office might be the only ones working on the unit. You don’t want that. As a property manager, we’re going to make sure that we send it out to every other office in the area. You will never have to deal with the tenants, the phone calls, or anything else related to the lease, or even talking to that agent. We more or less will just tell you when your units re-rented.

How about maintenance?

Maintenance is the worst situation where there are those late-night phone calls. The fact that you’re scared to go on vacation because of the fact that you deal with an emergency. You don’t have to worry about that either as we have staff 24/7. Imagine never having to worry about those calls ever again. The worst is actually the tenants themselves.

You as a landlord might say, I have great relationships with my tenants. That is until you don’t. We are allowed to keep a little bit of space between you and the residence. They don’t know who you are, they don’t know how to reach you, and it doesn’t become too personal in the sense that you worry about more landlords we’re seeing mismanage their properties, and costing them in the long term. The fact that they’re not increasing their rents upon renewals, where they’re not handing renewals well.

That means either not putting them back on a lease, which means that the tenants go to tenants at will, not increasing their rents and getting the money that they deserve. Imaging that doing that year after year after year, you’re stuck in a place where you’re hundreds of dollars in the hole because you haven’t increased rents, but yet your expenses, such as your taxes and water continually go up. You don’t want to be in that situation. So as a property manager, we treat it as a business. We’re going to make sure that we take care of it, that we increase rents, and we still have that personal connection with your tenants. We just want to make sure that it doesn’t become personal, and it just stays as a business.

In addition, we just want to make sure that you as a landlord, get your time and freedom and peace of mind back, and that’s really the true cost of being able to self manage your property yourself. We want to be able to make sure for a very small amount. I’m just going to give you an example here. If your rents two thousand dollars, the management fees are about six percent a month, maybe five if you have multiple properties, and then equates out about fifteen hundred and eighteen hundred dollars across the year. That’s for three hundred and sixty-five days, worth of actual labor. We are doing everything from the maintenance to the renewal, to the paperwork, to all the rent collection.

That’s a very small amount to pay for your peace of mind

You really got to think about what your time is worth, and you might really enjoy doing the property manager and that’s fine, you can enjoy it, but it’s not a hobby. Real estate and real estate owning an investment property landlord is a job and a business, and it should be treated as such. Unless you have that full-time commitment and a full-time staff to be able to handle every single aspect of it, don’t do it as a hobby. Delegate to someone else. You can enjoy working on cars and that’s fine you can do that. There are just certain things that should be done, and this is an investment worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, bringing income into your pocket.

If you or anyone else you know is looking for a property manager to ease your mind, and to be able to give you back the time that you deserve for a very small amount, please think of Green Ocean Property Management. You get more than a property manager, you get peace of mind.