Measured by revenue, the US market size for the US property management industry is worth a stunning $85.5 billion in 2021.

One of the primary roles of a project management company is to deal directly with tenants or potential tenants. This way, owners of rental property investments don’t need to spend time marketing their rental properties, screening potential tenants, negotiating with them, collecting rent, tackling repair and maintenance issues, or pursuing evictions.

Successful property management involves experience handling rental property and offers the owner the best solutions. If you’re interested in joining the more than 800,000 property management service providers in the US currently, we’ve prepared eight practical property management tips to help you build a thriving business.

Read on to learn more.

1. Document Everything

A rental property management company should strive to document its interactions with tenants.

Be sure also to keep comprehensive documents of exactly what you do. This doesn’t mean simply making statements of what you do, but writing down precisely how much time you’re spending on each of your projects. How much time do you spend to set up listings, answer calls, do showings, and communicate with contractors?

Sure, it’s not easy to document everything, but give it a try for a week, tracking your work so you get a clearer idea of how exactly you spend your time.

2. Use Time Blocks to Batch Your Work

Batching your work into time blocks makes it easier to document what you do. The idea is to focus on one thing at a time instead of multi-tasking. 

When you just started offering property management services and are still a small company, it may seem like multi-tasking is the way to go. After all, it seems like you always have issues to deal with. One to put out those fires is to hire someone else to help you.

By batching your work, you stay in flow with what you’re doing. For instance, you can group all of your work on showings or listings into a single time block. Recent studies show that switching between tasks leads to inefficiency.

3. Start Scheduling Your Time

Do you have a scheduling system for the things you wish to do on a daily basis? If not, then your to-do list exists only in your mind. The problem with that is that the more stuff you store in your mind, the higher the chances of becoming stressed as you try to remember everything you need to do.

Start writing things in a calendar instead. When you do that, you’ll not have to think more about all the things you need to do and focus on the task at hand.

4. Develop a Pre-Screening Form

For most property managers, screening tenants is the most time-consuming task. There’s so much to do, and communicating with non-qualified tenants can suck a lot of time.

Sure, you may have included your criteria in the rental listing, but many tenants don’t bother to read them. Even when they don’t meet your minimum requirements, they still send emails and make calls to enquire about vacancies.

The best way to weed out such tenants is to create a form survey and add it to your rental listing. Require interested tenants to take the survey in order to be considered. From these surveys, it’s easy to see which tenants to follow up with.

5. Use Photos to Indicate the Rental Criteria

When looking to rent property, most renters usually look at the location, price, and pictures of the property.  Few take the time to read everything in your listing so they can understand your rental criteria. Hence, many will reach out to you without reading your requirements on income standards, pet policy, or smoking policy. 

The best way to counter this problem is to note down your rental criteria and take a photo of them. Make that photo the second picture on your rental listing so that it’s impossible for potential tenants to miss it.

6. Stay Connected With Your Staff

If you have a team, you need to make sure that every member is on the same page at all times. That could mean having a 15-minute briefing at the start of each day to ensure that everyone knows what’s going to happen during the day.

The idea is to assign tasks to the right people and to make sure help is immediately available when necessary. Each member of your team should be ready to proceed without obstacles.

Always allow room for questions, clarifications, and concerns during your briefings. Doing so helps you avoid frustrations and saves everyone time during the actual tasks.

7. Outsource Tasks Where Necessary

Everyone can do with some help from an outside team, as this guide on accidental landlords shows – the same applies to property managers. You don’t have to handle everything on your own, including redundant and tedious tasks.

You can hire a virtual assistant team (VA) team to handle potential sales-related queries. You can also outsource your website maintenance tasks while your team focuses on other more important tasks in your company.

The best thing with outsourcing services is that you can make significant time and cost savings.

That being said, take note that some states require that the project management handle certain tasks that should not be outsourced.

8. Establish Office Hours

Having clearly established office hours seems like a simple property management tip, but it’s crucial for every tenant to know when they can reach you during non-emergency situations. Generally, you want your tenants to know when they can contact management personnel for repairs and maintenance.  

With clearly stated regular office hours, prospective renters also know when to call or come in to make inquiries about rental vacancies.

Successful Property Management Is Possible

Property management demands handling a range of tasks, from negotiating contracts to tackling tenant issues. With the successful property management tips we’ve shared in this guide, you can keep things running smoothly around the clock.

Are you interested in reading more great content on property management? Please, keep visiting our blog.

Jane