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5 Ways to be a great Landlord

You have a property manager in place for a reason, but without good cooperation from a landlord, they can’t always deliver the best experience possible for tenants.
 
Property management does not mean you get to hand everything over to someone else and reap the rewards. Ultimately, it’s still your property, so your personal investment in taking care of it and your tenant is crucial. Here are the top 5 things you can do to ensure you become to a great landlord to your tenant.
 
Be responsive
Be available and responsive in emergencies so your property manager can provide fast and effective solutions. Poorly executed resolutions to problems will inevitably cost you more in the long run.
 
Take care of your property and your tenants
Until you’ve had bad tenants you have no idea how good you’ve got it. Above being responsive, is being on top of things in the name of prevention. Get detailed reports from property inspections and act on them. If an appliance is not running well, get it serviced. If the property manager says something looks a little tired, replace it. If the tenant is unhappy with something related to the property, find out why and at least explore what you could do to change things for them.    
 
Let the property manager do their job
Your property manager is your first port of call for all issues and any contact you have with the tenant should defer to them. If you feel your property manager is not being as responsive as you’d like, escalate your issue to our principal. COVID has placed time constraints on our team, but communication is critical and if you ever feel there’s a shortfall, we want to correct that.
 
Respect boundaries
Don’t turn up to do some gardening because you were driving by and noticed the lawn needing mowing. Don’t drop things off, or knock on the door and surprise your tenant, or replace something without going through the proper processes as outlined in your lease. This is why you have a property manager and the obligations of you as the landlord are clearly detailed in the lease agreement.
 
Let your tenants live their lives
Don’t think of tenants as just a means to pay the mortgage, others understand the value in respecting them as people with their own lives. Refusing reasonable requests for things like pets, or hooks in walls for hanging pictures, affects their ability to make your property their home. If they aren’t given the chance to make it theirs, why on earth would they stay into the future?

by Dot Hamilton