FAQ – Owners

We leverage the Internet to gain maximum exposure for your listing. Rather than just list it in the local real estate listing service, we also syndicate your listing to the most trafficked real estate websites on the Internet. We invest in the same professional-caliber photography and copywriting in your rental as we do in selling a home. Why? Because it works.

We conduct a thorough review of an applicant’s employment history, residential history, credit history and criminal history. In addition to that, we also have proprietary methods for screening a tenant and conduct an in-person or phone interview before we give you our recommendation.

We spend a lot of effort to make sure we have systems in place to communicate with our owners and tenants on a regular schedule. It’s important for a property manager to stay “top-of-mind” with a tenant so that they will be remembered when a work order needs to be submitted and it reduces the likelihood of the property being neglected. We have invested in Owner Portals and Tenant Portals that can be used for paying a ledger balance, reviewing contracts, reviewing statements, submitting a work order and much more.

Risk-reduction is one of the most important tasks for a property manager. If your property manager does not understand that, you are playing with a loaded gun. In order to reduce the risks of miscommunication and disputes over the property condition, we use move-in checklists and leverage photography during the three most critical times of a lease: Prior to a tenant moving in, two weeks after a tenant has moved in, and immediately following a tenant moving out.

Our goal is to provide a timely response to work orders and to have access to a network of vendors that provide professional work and are cost-effective. We have work order systems that are transparent to the owner to foster trust and accountability. For example, every owner receives a real-time alert when a work order is submitted and all work must be verified via phone or in-person (depending on the type of repair) prior to the vendor receiving payment. Before and after photography is used whenever possible and all invoices, photographs and work order requests are stored in the owner’s records for review at any time.

After all that is done to screen the tenant, no matter how many fancy records are checked, proprietary ratios are calculated, and money that is paid, it all boils down to the results. If a company ends up evicting 5 out of every 100 property leases, you have a 5% eviction rate. That may sound good to most property management companies, but that is too high for us. We have had just ONE single family home eviction in our company history, which is less than a 1% eviction rate. If a property management company doesn't know what their eviction rate is, run...don't walk, out the nearest exit! You can't know that you are doing an adequate job placing tenants if you don't even measure the results.

Well, it starts with the idea that evictions cost the property owner both time and money and is a negative event. If this is a negative event for the owner, it should be a negative event for the property management company as well. This may sound crazy, but there are some property management companies that actually MAKE money for doing an eviction! During an eviction that we help you with, the only costs that you incur are the necessary fees that we pay on your behalf such as court costs. The time we spend at court or the time we spend driving to the tenant's home to post notices are all considered part of our management services and do not cost you anything extra. The reason we have such a low eviction rate is because we have just as much incentive as you do to avoid an eviction, because it costs us in lost productivity and it simply isn't worth it.

We also have a very thorough due diligence process we undergo with every prospective tenant. Although we don't do medical check-ups, our process includes a few "in-house" methods that most companies and individual owners don't even think about. Sometimes, the findings from these methods could mean the difference between approval or disapproval.

I'm sure you may have heard of the saying “Go Big or Go Home.” However, we feel going BIG can sometimes means sticking with small. Sure, if you want the traditional management company that's managing several hundred properties, owns big maintenance trucks and is an eviction producing machine, we may not be the company for you. There are a lot of these big traditional companies that will manage anything that has a roof on it and they charge very little, making their profit from a large portfolio. The client is often not remembered by their name, but by a property address, and no effort is invested into reducing the eviction ratio, because when evictions are done in bulk, it's cheaper and more profitable for the big companies. However, if you want a smaller, locally-owned company that knows you by name, has strong values and specializes in single-family homes, we may be a good fit. We have stopped accepting multi-family properties, that can take up to 90% of a property management company's resources and only provide 10% of the revenues. By focusing on single family homes, we can re-invest our profits into our company and all of our owners benefit equally. By marketing higher-end properties, we attract a more financially qualified pool of renters that can reduce your risk of an eviction occurrence. We don't want to be naive and think that all great companies are small. After all, we want to grow our portfolio too! A sign of growth means that people actually are liking what we do. So, a second important question to ask a property management company is

We have a small property-to-staff ratio that most traditional companies cannot offer. Most parents will agree that a small teacher-to-student ratio contributes to receiving high quality education. We believe in this concept and have built a strong team consisting of a Property Manager, Service Manager, Comptroller, Office Manager, three Leasing Specialists and a Maintenance team to oversee our portfolio. Our goal is to maintain a ratio of less than 25 properties for every staff member, or 25:1. This is rarely seen in the property management industry and results in better communication, more specialization in specific skillsets and a better experience for both the owner and tenant. According to the National Association of Realtors, the Internet is one of the top ways that consumers find their next home. Therefore, curb appeal is no longer how your home looks from the actual curb, but from a prospect's computer screen! If you leave a great first impression on the Internet and you are priced accurately, chances are your home will be visited more often and leased out quickly. However, if you short change the consumer experience by being stingy in how many photos you showcase or use poor amateur photography, you will sabotage your leasing efforts.

We use professional photography to differentiate your home from the myriad of other rentals competing for that tenant. We then syndicate your home to the top real estate websites and market it 365 days out of the year on our own property management website. No other company that we know of does this. This gives us an opportunity to secure a renter months before the existing tenant's lease is over, reducing vacancies and increasing the profit on your investment.