How Difficult Is It to Manage Multiple Properties Alone?
If you’re making money as a landlord, it may be quite fulfilling. A single rental property is often manageable for most investors. Even a person with a bit of an appetite may manage two or three at a time.
However, self-managing your rental properties might quickly become a full-time job if you go beyond that point. Managing several income properties is no easy task, but the rewards may outweigh the difficulties!
Let’s take a look at some common difficulties that all DIY landlords face:
Filling Your Vacancies through Showings and Marketing
One of the first difficulties you’ll have is filling those vacancies, which necessitates showing the property. All landlords experience vacancies from time to time.
You’ll need to get them on the phone, arrange a time and day for them to go through with you, and set up some web marketing with pictures and descriptions for each unit you need to fill.
It can take a lot of time to show a home to potential renters, mainly if there is little demand for rentals in the area or if you are doing it during a challenging season (like the winter) when fewer people are moving in.
Screening and Selecting Your Tenants
Even if you can handle showings and scheduling for prospective tenants on your own, you will still need to take on the difficult chore of vetting them and choosing the best choice.
Detailed credit records, landlord histories, and other information could be available to a professional property management business. They may also provide you with professional instruments to ensure you have all you need to complete the work successfully.
It’s complex and takes time to choose the ideal tenant, but if you succeed, maintaining a rental property with good tenants will be simpler for you.
Dealing With Tenant Disputes
Dealing with ongoing tenant complaints and disputes is a significant portion of managing several rental properties. It would be best if you moved quickly to address your tenant’s concerns when maintenance issues persist, or a nearby pet keeps them up all night.
A tenant who pays rent on time and maintains the property under the terms of their lease would anticipate receiving prompt and professional care should a problem arise.
Maintaining Your Properties
The most significant time-consuming difficulty that self-managing landlords have, regardless of whether they have excellent, poor, or indifferent tenants in their properties, is organizing maintenance and repairs.
Even for an extremely handy owner, arranging and doing even minor repairs at several properties can take a lot of time. The truth is that if you own several properties and frequently have maintenance issues, you’ll need to compile a list of reliable contacts that can expedite the process.
Even if you contract out maintenance and repairs, planning and organizing events will take time to do. Additionally, you must maintain a list of contractors that is sufficiently long to accommodate requests from several properties at once.
Managing Your Time
You must learn to manage your working hours wisely if you own many properties since it might feel like you are being tugged in ten directions at once.
Most investors aim to generate “passive income,” but this is challenging to do if you also need to regularly promote unoccupied properties, collect rent, and oversee general maintenance.
This is why once they have acquired more than one property, many investors feel it worthwhile to work with property management companies.
Conclusion
As you can see, managing several rental properties is not easy. Yet, it is possible to manage properties with success.
If you are even thinking about multiple properties, you may consider getting help to make managing your properties easier. A property manager can help you by handling unoccupied units, providing needed maintenance and repairs, and collecting rents.
Are you looking for property management companies in NYC? NYC Apartment Management is a top-rated apartment management company capable of handling multiple property types for your convenience. Give us a call to learn more.