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Monday, October 19, 2009

Property Management

By Layla Vanderbilt

Now that you have bought a small apartment building, you have to decide if you should try and manage it yourself or should you have a property management company to manage it for you. In order to make the best decision, you should determine what your goals are for the building and also what your skills are.

When deciding our goals for the apartment building, first you should decide on if you want to be an investor or a landlord. Each role, either landlord or investor, has their own set of requirements. If you want to be an investor, you will need time securing investment properties and selling them. If you want to be a landlord, your time will be spent handling the everyday tasks required to manage the apartment building. This will include advertising, application processing and also maintaining the apartment building, to include fixing repair items.

Successful investors hire someone to manage their properties in order to free up their time to finding and selling properties. Hiring a good property management company will free up your time to allow you to focus on investing.

When you first start out in property investments, you are tempted to try and be the landlord and an investor at the same time. If you are able to do both successfully, you will save money by not hiring a property manager and have more cash flow for your investments.

If you have to be the landlord because you cannot afford to hire someone to manage the property for you, you should review your business plan and cash flow forecast. You should also look to see if you paid and financed the property correctly. When buying rental investment property, the income should cover all expenses, including property management, even if you do it yourself.

Also ask yourself whether you have the skills to manage the property yourself. It takes a special temperament to be able to collect from late tenants. It takes special skills to be able to perform many repairs.

It takes knowledge and connections to be able to negotiate cleaning services, repairs, and other services that your property will need. A good management company already has the expertise and connections to perform such services, often at a lower cost.

Finally, with the services of a property management company any vacated room will be prepared for re-renting within days. For instance if they get the room re-rented one or two weeks quicker than you would have done you end up getting extra income therefore the management service actually pays for itself with regard to the time and money saved. - 23208

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