Never underestimate the importance of property maintenance, especially if you want your business to ‘survive’ and you want to protect your tenants.
Maintaining a property (a house, a building, etc) is crucial if you want the condition to remain good and intact. This is especially crucial if you have rental properties with occupants inside them. What you should do to maintain your property?
Property Maintenance: What It’s about?
The ‘activity’ refers to any reactive or preventive action that is taken to keep one property remains fully functional so it can operate within the best condition. Basically, it’s about keeping your property within its optimal condition, whether in comfort as well as function.
There are a various arrays of requests and responsibilities. It’s possible that you as the landlord need to respond to the maintenance request from the tenant.
You may have to deal with HVAC system repair and service, maintain the landscape, do the pest control, clean common areas, paint certain parts, and such things alike. Safety check and inspections are also the crucial part of property maintenance.
Things like checking whether there are unsafe conditions or inspecting malfunctioning equipment can be considered the crucial actions.
The maintenance work itself may include:
- Pest control. You want to perform rodent or pest check, control, and also removal when necessary. Preventative measures should also be included in this part, such as removing the trash on a timely manner, so trash scheduling is also crucial.
- Exterior maintenance. You may be familiar with the term grounds maintenance, which is basically about the exterior maintenance and upkeep. This process includes cleaning up the exterior area of the proper, including the drains and roof gutters. It also includes gardening, landscaping, snow removal (in certain areas), graffiti removal, and repair.
- Recycling and trash. Trash removal and separation (including the recycling) should be a part of the preventive maintenance, especially to deal with pest control.
- Common area maintenance. This usually cover the upkeep activities (cleanliness and repairs) of common areas, like mail rooms, hallways, stairways, etc.
- Safety check. It includes smoke detectors and also carbon monoxide detectors maintenance and checking. Proactive inspections should also be done, including mechanical and electrical system. It’s crucial that owners also schedule periodic (safety) inspections of the grounds and property.
- Interior maintenance. This action would include electrical, HVAC, and plumbing systems. Owners need to keep all of those systems within a good (and working) condition for all common areas and units. They should also make quick repair whenever needed.
Property Manager vs DIY Work
Property maintenance can be quite a lot of work, especially if you have more than one property. Feel free if you want to do it on your own, for the sake of saving money.
But you should know that managing everything can be quite a lot. If you still have a main job, and you consider your extra property as an investment, it’s possible that you will be overwhelmed.
This is when most landlords or property owners would turn to property management or property management service. They aren’t only responsible for handling the property’s management, but they can also handle the maintenance. In general, the basic responsibilities would include:
- Screening tenants
- Deal with lease agreements (in terms that it may draft, sign, and renew the agreements on property owners’ behalf)
- Price property (to the max revenue while trying to minimize vacancy altogether)
- Deal with security deposits and collect rents
- Understand (and implement) national and state landlord-tenant regulations and laws
- Respond to maintenance requests
- Manage the tenants, including dealing with evictions, move outs, sublease requests, handle complaints, etc
- Market the rental property (ahead of vacancies) to prevent any empty unit
- Create property maintenance costs budgets (and adhere to them), such as addressing tear and wear, landscaping, and others
The Advantages of Hiring a Pro
You won’t have to worry about anything when you hire a property maintenance manager or service. Naturally, there are several advantages to it:
- It saves you time. As it was mentioned before, dealing with property maintenance is a full-time job. It’s time consuming and it can be quite overwhelming. If you let a pro deal with it, you alleviate your own burden. After all, they are the ones being familiar with the activities, so they basically know what to do.
- It gives you a peace of mind. When you entrust the property’s management to a professional, you won’t have to constantly be worried with its condition, with possible complaints, with maintenance requests, and such thing alike.
- It is cost effective. In most cases, hiring such a service would be more cost effective instead of having to do everything on your own or hiring any individual (or separate) business. When you have to hire your own plumber, your own gardener, or such thing alike, the costs may be higher.
Final Words
You need to decide whether you want to handle everything on your own or you want to hire a professional. The most important thing is that you shouldn’t underestimate the importance of property maintenance correctly so your real estate investment can flourish and be successful.
