During the busy season, it’s a good idea to review your lease agreements. One clause that has become more important in recent years is a clause about subletting. With the growing popularity of crowd sourced vacation rentals through websites like AirBnb, FlipKey, and VBRO, property managers need to make sure they are protected.
Electrical bills in the summertime can be extremely costly. Especially in particularly hot summers, where the air conditioning has to run more often. Helping your residents save money on air conditioning has multiple benefits. It helps maintain lease renewals and keeps them cool and happy. Here are six ways you can help reduce the costs of air conditioning this summer.
During the summertime, your rental needs a little more maintenance than usual. Between landscaping, pool cleaning, and painting, you’ll probably have to hire some contractors to get all the work done. However, before hiring anyone, you need to make sure that they are qualified, honest, and reasonably priced. If you need to hire contractors this summer, here is how to make sure that you hire the best possible candidates.
Making a strong first impression is critical to filling vacancies. During the summer months, that means upping your curb appeal with attractive landscaping. However, elaborate landscaping can be an inexpensive upfront investment that requires a lot of costly maintenance. Fortunately, if you plan your landscaping strategy right, you can achieve curb appeal without minimal work and long-term costs. Here are five ways to upgrade your landscaping that will add curb appeal while also saving you time and money:
It’s easy to spot high-performing team members, but what about those high-potential team members that tend to fly under the radar? Investing in development for high-potential team members is a great way to ensure the continued positive growth of your community management, and provides team members with the tools they’ll need to really thrive and flourish.
Objections can make or break a prospect, and its management’s job to work through these objections in creating happy community members. A simple method to overcoming objections includes:
It’s important for management to never underestimate the follow-up. After a great visit or tour, you want to keep that good impression going, and retain that space in the prospects’ consciousness. With follow-up, you’ll show a caring side and a side that is willing to do whatever it takes to incorporate prospects into your community. 5 tips for the most effective follow-up techniques are:
Trips and outings can do a great deal for building that community feeling. It gives community members a reason to get together in the perfect setting for fun and engagement, but where are the best places to go? Monthly or seasonally, hosting a trip sign-up in your community encourages residents to get up, get out, and build that community feeling and loyalty organically, and you’ll want to choose locations that offer a great deal for engagement in an inexpensive way that also promises a memorable time. 4 ideas for community building excursions or trips are:
When creating a listing for print or online, it is important that copy accurately describes the property. However, finding ways to come up with intriguing and accurate descriptions can be difficult. Often property managers will just use the same description over and over again with little to no results. Writing a listing takes a little practice, but with the right guidance you’ll easily be able to attract the potential renters you need. Here are some tips to get you inspired:
Late rental payments can be a burden for property managers. Beyond having to follow-up with your renters, without the income it can be difficult to pay your bills on time. Late rental payments are going to be something you will have to deal with from time to time. However, there are some processes you can implement to help reduce the amount of late payments you receive.
With the new tax reforms going into effect, you may be wondering what you can write-off this year. Mostly, the new reforms do not change much for property managers. To help you understand some of these new benefits, here are five write-offs not to miss this year:
Staging a residence is incredible important for attracting renters and filling vacancies. When you are ready to list your space and start giving tours, you should stage the space. If you’ve never staged a rental before, there’s a couple thing you’ll need to buy. Here is a basic shopping list to get your started.
Creating a community newsletter is a really great way to bring your community together while keeping everyone informed and in the know. Within this newsletter you can list any community events that may be going on, local stores and restaurants running promotions, your contact information, and anything else you want the community to know or feel they would benefit from absorbing. So, how do you go about choosing the best format and content for your newsletter?
The relationship management builds with residents makes a huge impact on resident retention. Of course a resident will not wish to stay within a community where they don’t feel heard, appreciated, or part of a larger whole, and the responsibility of building that feeling largely rests on how management approaches resident rapport. It’s important for management teams to remember that residents can always go elsewhere, and it will take something special to keep them a part of your community.
When you take a prospective resident on a tour, you’re giving them their first glimpse into life within your community. Because of this, staging your touring residences is incredibly important, and just as the right staging can turn a prospect into a leasing resident, the wrong staging can send them running in the opposite direction. 5 staging mistakes that you may not realize you’re making, and which could cost you a resident, are:
A community atmosphere can be your biggest tool in achieving resident retention, but it’s something that needs to be born organically and in a way that feels natural rather than forced. For management teams, this can be quite the challenge to build the community atmosphere you want, while eliminating the feeling that it is being intentionally built at all. Essentially, you want this atmosphere to appear as if it has grown on its own, while you’re actually watering and tending to it like a real growing organism. 5 ideas to inspire you to better build your community atmosphere are:
The market is constantly changing, so it’s always a good idea to revamp your marketing strategies to meet new trends. With the start of the New Year, it’s a great idea to try some different tactics to fill your vacancies. One of the best ways to do this is to think outside of the box and come up with some really creative and unique ways to target your audience. Here are some unusual ideas to inspire you:
When your business grows and it is time to hand over the day to day operations to a new employee, you may not know what to look for in a great apartment manager. When drafting your job listing and interviewing potential candidates, there are some key skills to find. Here are the seven most important skills that any apartment manager should have:
You’ve hooked a potential renter with your great marketing. You’ve given them a tour that went really well. You know they’d be an ideal renter and they’d fit right into your community. However, you haven’t heard back from them about the space. What do you do? Many property managers will just wait and hope to hear back, but we recommend following up with the potential renter to keep the relationship going and fill your vacancy. Here’s how to follow up with a potential renter.
Whether you are first starting out as a property manager or are just looking for a way to improve your business operations, a great investment to consider is property management software. Property management software offers a range of features and benefits and can really help you improve your business. Here is a basic overview of everything you need to know about property management software to get you started.
