This is why I like self-managing...

A PM should have basic competency and a checklist of issues/resolutions eg:
  • Lights/power not working - have you checked the fuse/breaker? Reset the breaker/replaced fuse? Has it tripped again? Unplug XXX equipment, reset breaker, reinstall XXX one at a time (does it trip?) Ah. Get the appliance serviced.
  • Gas hot water not hot - has the pilot light gone out? Has the gas been turned off? Is the unit running on off-peak?
  • Smoke alarm keeps beeping - change the freaking battery
  • Door keeps blowing closed - get yourself some door stops.
  • Water flows through the garage in heavy rain - duh, it is a water course (have you cleaned the stormwater gutter full of leaves)?
  • I'm locked out - 'here's $0.50, call yourself a locksmith or pay our out of hours person to attend the property to open up
 
That's exactly what we are going to do from now on after the recent case.

Recently we had a new tenant. It's worse than Wylie's case, within her first week we had numerous calls from our PM. Our PM was given a list of maintenance requests (what the tenant reckons, not in our PM's opinion at all). The list was never sent to us by our PM, thanks god. Don't forget, she had an inspection before signing up the lease. e.g. Obviously someone has had foxtel connection without our knowledge, she requested to have an antenna for her TV. Fine, after talking to PM, it's our obligaion to put it on. Other complaints were put off by our PM. We just ignored them as she got what she saw. Hey, it's a 8 years old new house. Then..... next week or so, she called again. Master bedroom toilet problems. My hubby really did not want to deal with this tenant. So we sent a plumber out. Problems fixed. The following week, another call, toilet was blocked. This time, my usual PM was not there, the assistant (must be) called and had already sent someone out. Fine. Emergency case. When I got my next rental statement, I got charged twice, closed to $500. Why? Because their plumber was there twice, first fixed the blocked toilet. Secondly without our knowledge, changed the whole new toilet. Emergency case, the assistant argued. There are 3 toilets in the house. Emergency???? NO.

Another case, light replacement claiming all sort of emergency excuses, it would be on fire etc...etc...if it's not attended to. We had enough, my hubby went this time, it's just a matter of changing a new bulb.

Hey, I could go on and on....

Suppose this is the fun part of property investing.:(

I hope you are planning to move agents. Or at the least give them a serve and last warning.

We attend to all problems but try not to react immediately as then it becomes a situation of calling us first. We still employ a PM to take the calls, collect the rent and deal with all the tenant issues.
 
I hope you are planning to move agents. Or at the least give them a serve and last warning.

We attend to all problems but try not to react immediately as then it becomes a situation of calling us first. We still employ a PM to take the calls, collect the rent and deal with all the tenant issues.

I had already moved to a new agent. But with this type of tenant which every call is urgent, I have stressed to my new agent to always contact us first before doing anything. I really hope this new agent and the replacement will follow this simple instruction.

However this agent keeps saying that emergency case needs to be attended within 24 hours (I believe it's right). But with non urgent case, it needs to be dealt with in a week time. Is this right:confused:?
 
My property is managed but this time the tenant contacted me....I received a text message a few weeks ago:

"Good morning, can we have permission to buy a new blind for the kitchen French doors. The roller mechanism has given up and will not wind up or hold. Are you ok with us buying a new blind and pass the invoice onto you or the real estate?
We would like to get this done asap as my husband goes back to work Friday."

I was only 20 min away when I received the text so I said "No I will come around now and have a look"

When I arrived to look at the blind the tenant then decides to tell me how there dog had chewed away the bottom of the blind! It was chewed at the bottom and in a disgusting state. This is why they were so kind to contact me and offer to replace the blind for me...then send me the invoice!!::eek:

The roller mechanism ended costing $2.75 from spotlight but a new blind would have been $300 at least as it wasn't a standard size.

I'm glad I checked! So now they will receive an invoice to replace the blind.
 
A bit of tact goes a long way - which you are obviously all over :).
In your case, I would be pointing out to the tenant (as tactfully as possible) that these are things they should be able to handle, otherwise a precedent is set where calling you is always the first stop rather than taking 10 minutes to have a look first.

Thanks Jody. I saw he was embarrassed when the hoses were squashed, so I'm hoping this will be the end of this type of call. But if it continues, we will be nicely letting him know these are not our problems.

The day of him first seeing the house and wanting to take it, he wanted to know if he could move the TV point further along a wall. We said he could join into the existing one and drill up through the floor to attach a second point. He said "That would be great if you could do that". We made it clearly (nicely) that if "he" wanted to do that, we were happy to have a second point, but to leave the first one where it is for another tenant".

It is funny because the tenants who left left this house were similar, and we had to keep knocking back their petty requests to move the position of the outlet of the air-con, spray for weeds, but not where the cat sleeps :eek:, trim some bushes, but not where the cat might climb etc. Drove us mad. We knocked them back, but they didn't seem to take the hint :D. We used to have a good chuckle about some of their requests.
 
I was once a PM anything that was a tenant issues we always charged the tenant. In this case they would have paid for both of the bills. Although most likely a tradie wouldn't have been sent out.

As a PM you are trained to ask a series of questions such as have you checked... blaaa, and we used to advise the tenant that if it is due to their lack of knowledge then they will need to pay. This is agreed upon prior to the work being done. So as a landlord you may not even know what the PM is doing in the background that your tenant is paying for. Its not something we would advise the owner of. Actually a landlord doesn't see half of what a property manager does.

Most tenants are happy to pay an invoice because they feel stupid, they didn't know how to fix the issue themselves.

Our tradies were also switched on, meaning they would call the tenant and find out what was going on and in many instances could sort the fix out over the phone.

I disagree with the micromanage comments posted here. Sure Pm's need owners feedback. Don't forget they are trying to manage 100 or more other properties and can't write enough notes or remember everything about each house. They are generally on a crappy wage, contacted by tenants 7 days a week, under huge stress, and without any support from the business owner. So please cut them some slack. Most try to do the best they can its just landlords don't get to see it.
 
Great post jenny-nextplace. You sound like a great PM. I guess the posts here about slack ones do taint the whole industry, like the whole real estate industry, but I have two family members who have been in this industry so I know the hard work and stress from the other side of the fence.
 
Hi Wylie,

Yes - it's funny sometimes you just get properties that attract certain tenants and it's not always obvious which properties will attract which tenant type.

We've got a lovely property under management and it baffles me that we get hard hard work tenants each time it changes over and each tenant changeover so far has been a lease break - always for personal reasons - unrelated to the property or area. The applications on this property go through all the same reference checks as every other property.

Another property we have is a very weird house - very strange set up (I like it though! :)). I thought we'd have a bit of trouble leasing it due to the strange layout but we've had a lovely, trouble free family in there since day one.

Anyway, I should probably get back to work.

Cheers,
Jody
 
I was once a PM anything that was a tenant issues we always charged the tenant.

Just wondering if there are any tradies in the forum. I am sure it would be easier for you to get paid from the landlord or the agent. Sure there are good and honest tradies out there too, but won't it be easier to just say it's landlords problems and you know you would definitely get paid when they receive their next rental payment. Money is there. Whereas if you go through the tenant, it might turn out to be a written off bad debt.

I disagree with the micromanage comments posted here. Sure Pm's need owners feedback. Don't forget they are trying to manage 100 or more other properties and can't write enough notes or remember everything about each house. They are generally on a crappy wage, contacted by tenants 7 days a week, under huge stress, and without any support from the business owner. So please cut them some slack. Most try to do the best they can its just landlords don't get to see it.

I truly agree with you here. There are many good property managers out there too. But without the support from your company and being put under all the stress, throwing so many properties under one shoulder so that they could have huge profit every year, would make you guys underperformed. I have seen good property manager but it does cause us lots of money too as you can see from this thread if you did one simple mistake. Hope you understand.

Sounds like it's not a nice profession to be in (at least for me).:rolleyes:
 
Just wondering if there are any tradies in the forum. I am sure it would be easier for you to get paid from the landlord or the agent. Sure there are good and honest tradies out there too, but won't it be easier to just say it's landlords problems and you know you would definitely get paid when they receive their next rental payment. Money is there. Whereas if you go through the tenant, it might turn out to be a written off bad debt.



I truly agree with you here. There are many good property managers out there too. But without the support from your company and being put under all the stress, throwing so many properties under one shoulder so that they could have huge profit every year, would make you guys underperformed. I have seen good property manager but it does cause us lots of money too as you can see from this thread if you did one simple mistake. Hope you understand.

Sounds like it's not a nice profession to be in (at least for me).:rolleyes:

Yes, I am a tradie, actually dual refrigeration/air mech and electrician and property investor.
Our buisiness handles service calls from 2 south side real estates and we always call the tenant to discuss the issues with the air cons or electrical before attending. About 80% of the time we need to go out as the property managers we deal with are usually good at their jobs so have sussed out the nity gritty first.
A lot of tradies including myself who run successfull buisiness usually are very busy doing genuine jobs whether from small switch problem call outs to large whole new house installations to waste both our time, tenants time, PM 's time and owners time if it can be sorted out over the phone and isn't because the capable tenant was lazy to unplug faulty kettle causing RCD to keep tripping or wash the dust filters or change batteries in the AC remote.We value our free time time too and with lots of other clients some long term we have to keep happy as well if I can do phone fix then all the better, but if its a genuine issue then we make it a priority according to what the problem is.

The 2 PM's I have been dealing with are very proffesional and work hard and do have to put up with a lot of crap. I once sorta had to put this bloke in his place while attending a service call because he just kept bad mouthing the PM when he was the lazy one causing all the issues and was just this big mouthed thing.The PM's I have had dealings with over the years who were slack we're probally so because of over stressed and under paid.

The Tradies or tenants who "milk" the system usually get found out quickly. People in this world are a lot more carefull with the hard earned stuff.

I used to do work for a few other agencies here and there over the years but some we got stuffed around with either jobs or payment. So we politely gave them the flick. The 2 now are good.
On the odd occasion we have been to a job and it's tenants fault then we prefer to bill the agency and let them sort out from then on as technically they are the ones that have contracted us into the job.

Sometimes I have not worried about billing anyone if it's tenants fault and it was a silly error, we were already doing other jobs in the area, and most importantly the tenant was nice on the phone, and made availiable a time for us in our busy schedule. Let a few go over the past 12 months.
But for the ones that were hard to organize and we go out and it's their issue they are also normally the ones who don' t even say hello when we are let in then they get charged a service fee.
But generally about 90% of the time most are good to do work for.

With my own 2 investment properties, I bought them locally and have them proffesionally managed by one of the agencies we do work for. The manager knows to direct all service calls to me first. As I am lucky if I can't fix it I have friends in all trades I just phone through to sort it for me.
Funny thing is at one of our investment properties, we acquired it at the start of the year, and tenant been there for 2 years prior and according to our manager has never missed rent but used to always put pressure on the poor girl about all sorts of trivial things. Once they realised I will be attending or my friends attending the property at these requests for service issues they have gone real quiet now according to our PM. As they pay the rent and look after the property well we have kept them on and when we did a new lease with them made sure they were well aware of costs incurred for time wasting call outs.

Cheers
 
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I scared most was phone call /email from PM Since he took over our PPOR. Everything was about maintenance.maintenance. First 1.5 month no tenants then finally got tenants with $20/wk lower than previous rent. When tenants moved in the rent was not even cover the maintenance. The Pm was quite keen to fix or change everything. The water bill got rebate once only. :mad:mad::mad:

Then suggestions came 'u'd better sell it cos too much negative'

I currently self manage this property tenants always pay rent on time& so far has not called up for any maintenance. It seems the house has changed to another one. Thx god. :D
 
There is another story though. We have a PM up in the north who has done a great job so far. Took tenants to tribunal & get insurance claimed, organized tradesman, got new tenants moved in etc. kept me updated with what was happening with my property. She is great!!! :D
 
We had a tenant recently who thought there was something wrong with the oven. We called in and set the timer, made sure the oven worked, then showed her how to set the timer so she can do it herself after a power outage. (It was in the manual she was supplied but it was not especially clear and the poor girl was in the middle of an entire move by herself as her partner was out of town and on top of that she was sick!).
Geez I wish our dodgey oven was fixed that quickly! Took 2 property management agencies (first one went into insolvency apparently) with repeated calls/emails to finally convince them that our oven was indeed stuffed, and it wasn't just because we couldn't figure out how to turn it on seeing as all of the dials had been rubbed off before we moved in (only 8 year old property/oven).

I had downloaded 2 different manuals to figure out how to turn the damn thing on, and tried 2 different oven thermometers over 8 months before they FINALLY got a repair guy to come in who replaced the broken thermostat (in about 20mins mind you... :rolleyes: ).

It's not just the tenants that are dodgey! Property managers have a lot to answer for! Maybe all of us renters should live in each others IPs so we can be sure we don't make silly call outs! ;)
 
A lot of tradies including myself who run successfull buisiness usually are very busy doing genuine jobs whether from small switch problem call outs to large whole new house installations to waste both our time, tenants time, PM 's time and owners time if it can be sorted out over the phone and isn't because the capable tenant was lazy to unplug faulty kettle causing RCD to keep tripping or wash the dust filters or change batteries in the AC remote.We value our free time time too and with lots of other clients some long term we have to keep happy as well if I can do phone fix then all the better, but if its a genuine issue then we make it a priority according to what the problem is.

Hi Coldspace, phone fix.... I like this idea and not in my knowledge had any tradies that I have come across doing it. But lately I learnt to ask my PM lots of question when it comes to any maintenance issues, before sending anyone out. I suppose I am phone fixing myself now. At least I satisfy myself first that a service call is needed. But I will try to use my own tradies. I found that a lot of issues could easily be handled by a very capable handyman. Cheaper as well.:D
 
I am in Perth , and self manage our local properties, but have to rely on PMs for Melbourne and Brisbane IPs.

In my opinion most younger tenants are aspirational home buyers with ultimate plans to purchase their own property. So whilst they can request the Landlord to solve their day-to-day issues they will ultimately have to deal with these issues themselves in the near future ………………… sometimes that thought gets me through.

In the past we have had ….

Tenant reports electrical faults with light fittings causing lights to blow (after recent rains). I decide to personally check before engaging electrician. No problem with light fittings (all dry), first new globe fitted works fine. Cause: Tenant fitted new (but faulty) globe initially so thought there was a problem with electrics rather than globe itself, so rather than double-checking with a second globe assumes the problem is obviously the Landlords.

NB: This is a not uncommon issue as unlike the joke, many tenants have NO idea how to change a light globe, especially if there is a light shade or fitting involved. Tenant also will generally have no idea in difference between Bayonet or Edison fitting or Halogen spotlight (12v versus 240v).

Door lock won’t work, key jams. Solution: two squirts of WD40 into lock and no further issue.

Hot water system faulty. Tenant has absolutely no idea of what a HWS is let alone of how it operates or how to turn it on. (Electrical HWS electrical switch or gas HWS pilot light). Yes, I saw the instruction manual(s) in the Tenant Folder but ………

Water meter. In most properties the water meter and isolation tap is normally near front boundary close to letterbox, however in an apartment building the water isolation valve (tap) can be in a service cupboard on each level in common void space near lift. Highly likely that tenant will have absolutely no idea of how to access this tap even as water overflows the leaking water system and runs under the front door into neighbouring apartments ……….. (nb: Body Corporates can also tend to keep these void cabinets locked so no one can cause damage to them!!!!)

RCD safety switches tripping and tenant not knowing where Electrical box is or how to reset .

He list goes on (smoke alarms, remote batteries etc) and it never ceases to amaze me how useless some people (especially males) are when it comes to basic household maintenance issues.

However, I don’t mind attending to these minor issues as I get to do it at my convenience as well as it gives me a chance to check on the property condition without a formal scheduled inspection.:)
 
Our PM is great. Except once sent and electrician and a handyman one after the other - handyman to fix the smoke alarm!!!! I was not happy at all. Ever since they have been told to run it past us everytime.

Now I've learnt to push back a little. Like recently I got an email saying that the garage door is not opening if I'd like to send a locksmith out to fix. I told her to call the strata company first to see if they can fix it. And voila and they said they will. More often than not most problems are fixable.
 
Great post jenny-nextplace. You sound like a great PM. I guess the posts here about slack ones do taint the whole industry, like the whole real estate industry, but I have two family members who have been in this industry so I know the hard work and stress from the other side of the fence.

Thanks wylie, I hope I was, and yes there are some very slack PM's out there.
When I was a manager I found it impossible to find good staff. I remember one time I advertised for a PM. I received 150 applications and out of that only 2 were worth hiring.

The problem is the more (as a PM) you cared for an owner and the property the harder the Job became. I can't remember how many times I went above and beyond, and worked in my own time, to only have either the tenant, owner or Principal still not happy. Its emotionally draining.

I have been in the industry for over 15 years and have seen PM's become alcoholics, verbally abused, stalked, threatened, their cars damaged, and had their own personal properties put at risk.

I personally have been threatened (quite violently), and verbally abused many times while trying to protect an owners property. It wasn't in my personality to not care so had to get out.
 
As a PM I will always invoice tenants for repairs if caused by them or if the call out is not needed. When a tenant calls and reports something is tripping the power I advise them that I will send an electrician to check, however, if it is one of their appliances tripping the power they are liable for the the costs. If the pilot light is out on a water service I ask tenants to check if the pilot light is lit and follow the directions on the door to re-light and then call me to let me know if it's working. If there are no directions for the tenant to follow then I talk to the landlord and send a plumber. If the tenant blows themselves up because of their ignorance and there are no instructions then that could come back on the landlord.

First thing I do is call the landlord about maintenance and the ones that live close by (as in the original post) will often ask if they can just drop by and have a quick look. :).
 
All in the same street can make it easier too

Wylie

We don't manage our 4 IP's but they are all in the same street and our daughter lives in the street as well.

Today I received a phone call from my BIL wanting to know if our tenants in the 4 bedder are moving out as there is a cleaning crew down there and he saw a motor home with the awning out there last week.


regards
Sheryn
 
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