Yarmmys Vargas is with us and we’re talking about rental property maintenance. Her previous experience is with apartment and multifamily properties, but she is currently our Orlando Operations Support Group Team Manager. She oversees maintenance requests and lease up services. Today, she’s helping us understand how to deal with rental property maintenance requests. You need a process that is orderly and strategic to help ensures things don’t go haywire.

Residential Property Maintenance: Act Fast

Two words are important when it comes to maintenance requests – “Act Fast.” We act fast by always having a great selection of pre-screened and approved vendors to go to for help. They can be trusted to go to the properties and service our maintenance issues. Once a tenant emails us with a problem, our system allows us to send it right to our vendors. Then, they have the knowledge and also the training and expertise in place to help us make the process go smoothly. They make a phone call to the tenant within 24 hours. Our goal is to get all maintenance requests resolved within 2 or 3 days, depending on the severity of the issue. We email the tenant and inform them which vendor we have chosen, and we instruct them to contact us if they don’t hear from the vendor within 24 hours. If that occurs, we’ll assign another vendor. Working quickly will help with due diligence and keep your tenants satisfied.

Residential Property Maintenance: Follow Up

“Follow Up” is one of the more important aspects of dealing with maintenance requests. We establish communication and ensure the job was done. We follow up with tenants and make sure the issue is not a problem anymore, and we follow up with vendors to ensure that they invoice us in the way we require invoices to be sent. It’s important that you don’t wait to hear back from the tenant. Be proactive and reach out to the tenant to ensure everything is resolved appropriately.
That’s all we have time for today, but if you have any questions about rental property maintenance or Orlando property management, please contact us at All County Property Management.

Kathi Thomas is our special guest today, and she is a licensed Realtor, a seasoned Property Manager, and a professional with prior years of experience in the Title industry. We’ve asked her to shed some light on a topic that’s important to many of the owners we work with: concerns for out of state owners and even owners who are out of the country. Kathi is going to highlight the top 5 concerns a property investor like that might have.

Planning the Money

The first concern for a real estate investor outside of the state is always the money. ROI is important, and part of our job is to create a Return on Investment for our owners. The obvious expenses right away are the mortgage and insurance. Then, there are always other expenses that are not so obvious, like HOA fees. So we have to make sure that an owner is prepared for everything. We want to discuss long term property goals and whether the owner will keep the property as an investment or retire to Florida and live in it someday.

Local Expertise

For a rental investment to be successful, someone must have knowledge of the local area. Owners expect us to guide them through the local rental market. We have to know what is renting for how much money, and where the subsets of various markets may be.

Local Laws

To avoid rental problems, a good property manager will understand local laws. An out of state owner is not going to know the Florida Landlord and Tenant Laws. As a professional management company, our owners can rely on us to know these laws and to track the changes. This helps us to mitigate risk. We watch for notices and security claims and we know how to navigate through those legal issues.

Finding Qualified Tenants

Most problems with rental property can be attributed to bad tenants. We make sure we’re placing good tenants who are not only able to pay rent but are stable. We conduct a full background check, and that doesn’t include only the criminal check. We collect a good overall picture of a tenant’s stability and ability to pay the rent. The lifeline of any rental investment is income production through a hihigh-qualityenant.

Maintenance Costs

The maintenance costs are not a fixed item. Owners, especially new investors, don’t always consider the costs of maintaining an investment property. So we help our investors understand that there are some unknowns. We do our best to maintain a property and implement preventative maintenance measures to keep costs down. It’s important for out of state investors to ask if there are mark-ups on maintenance work or if savings are passed on to the property owner.

The bottom line is the bottom line. There are a lot more things that out of state investors are concerned with, but these are the top five. If you have any questions or need any help with property management in Orlando, FL, please contact us at All County Property Management.