Monitoring Remote Management

A mother with two kids was sitting outside of her apartment, checking Facebook on her iPhone while the kids played with chalk on sidewalk. The apartment manager walked by, saw the children playing, and wandered over. She was heavily intoxicated, and went on a profanity laden tirade about children not being allowed to play with chalk on apartment property, all while the two children sat there terrified.

Within a month, the mother of two moved out in disgust. Apartment managers represent an example of an unsupervised manager. Rarely do tenants know the names or contact information of the ownership.

There is only the apartment manager, often with no oversight at all, running all of the apartment complexes.

Property ownership is a business like any other, and apartment managers are the only face of your business. You need to hire the best manager, and make sure they're doing everything they can to keep tenants happy and interested in staying with the property. This isn't possible if there is no oversight, because the only way to know if the manager is doing their job is to know the status of the tenants, including their satisfaction level with both the apartments and the manager.

Yet very few apartment complexes or property management companies do anything to oversee the effectiveness of the manager. Their contact information is rarely available, so any inappropriate or unprofessional conduct on the part of the manager goes unreported. This represents a serious flaw in the property ownership business model, and it provides too much power and job security to a position that may not be pulling its weight.

With property ownership, the tenants are the customers. As long as the customers are making your company money (ie, paying rent without ruining the property), then they need to be treated like valued customers. Like any customers, gauging their satisfaction is important.

Property owners, not managers, should do this regularly, to ensure that the apartment complex's needs are being met, the manager is doing their job professionally, etc. The worse an apartment complex is, the more bad press it will receive and the more tenants it will lose. There are several different ways that you can consider running this type of survey.

We will explore two of the available options in the next article.