How Can a Landlord Save Money on Property Maintenance?
With current economic problems, property owners are looking to cut costs any way they can to help with mortgage payments, property taxes, and insurance. Our experienced team at NYC Apartment Management put together this article to show you how to spend less on property maintenance, so you don’t have to struggle financially.
Preventative Property Maintenance
Performing routine preventative property maintenance checks yourself saves money by avoiding paying for a property maintenance service company and reducing the need for future building repair work. Small and easy-to-perform cleaning and upkeep tasks such as testing fire detectors, cleaning out gutters, and checking building utilities for water and gas leaks can prevent expensive and challenging property maintenance services that would develop from neglect. These safety checks are also much less likely to require a professional contractor’s expertise. These routine checks can save you in service costs and reduce your building areas that present inhospitable conditions. The work a property owner puts in to successfully keep a residential or commercial property in top condition has the added benefit of avoiding depreciation in real estate value.
Screen Your Tenants
One of the easiest ways to cut maintenance costs is to prevent the need for maintenance in the first place. Before allowing tenants to rent from you, carefully check their criminal history, eviction history, and credit history to decrease the likelihood of property damage, late rent, or other problems. You should also contact previous property management to see if a potential tenant has a history of losing their deposit. Good tenants invest in keeping their home safe and comfortable, making the need for property managers to pay for avoidable building maintenance work less likely.
Keeping your existing tenants happy can also help you as a landlord save money on property maintenance. High tenant satisfaction and, as a result, retention means that you avoid extensive cleaning and property maintenance efforts that are necessary to perform in the downtime between tenants. Ensuring that the premises are ready for new customers is exceptionally costly for property managers with high turnover rates. To answer maintenance requests quickly, you can create a convenient communication form such as a hotline, email, or digital platform to send your building maintenance team a service message. Providing a quick solution to smaller property maintenance service issues also has the benefit of preventing larger and more expensive types of repairs before they develop.
Do It Yourself Repairs
For the most part, a lot of property maintenance is easy to do without a professional work background in construction services, carpentry services, or plumbing repairs. The majority of costs associated with a contractor or handyman for property maintenance services come from labor. For example, a plumbing repair project with an estimate of $500 usually only requires $75 to $100 for the required parts. Even if you do not have any experience in building repair or maintenance, there are countless tutorial videos available that are made by qualified experts that can walk you through almost any job for your buildings. If the building job is relatively simple but requires expensive parts or tools, try to find coupons, discounts, or group memberships to make the purchase easier.
Whenever possible, try to repair malfunctioning elements of your property instead of replacing them altogether. If you have to entirely replace part of your property, consider investing in a more durable type of material to reduce the number of maintenance jobs in the long-run.
Professional Property Maintenance Services
There are times when maintenance service is beyond your abilities, requires prohibitively expensive repair tools, or is the type of emergency that must be fixed immediately. For these situations, you should rely on big-name professional property maintenance companies to service your buildings. Save any money you can by regularly calling a business team that has proven its quality of service with you before so that you can avoid further repairs for your buildings by making sure the services are done right the first time.
You should also consider hiring a property maintenance company for maintenance services that would take too much time or efforts for a single person to complete, such as upkeep of large areas like parking lots or large-scale building cleaning. Also, we recommend giving your tenants a reliable means of reaching a property maintenance team to quickly repair large issues such as gas or water leaks before they cause even more costly types of damage.
Our team at NYC Apartment Management can help a residential or commercial landlord save money they will need to grow their portfolio. Contact us today through our website or email to help you name and meet your property management goals.