Hi Friend,
I hope you are doing well.
If you are looking to buy your first rental property, you will benefit by reading this post.
Many experienced real estate investors will tell you that you need to manage your rental property like a “business”.
This is great advice because owning and managing one or more rental properties is indeed a business.
According to Wikipedia, a business is:
“…an organization involved in the trade of goods, services, or both to consumers. Business plan and Business model determine the outcome of an active business operation. Businesses are predominant in capitalist economies, where most of them are privately owned and administered to provide service to its customers.”
As per the definition above, ‘providing services’ to customers is what businesses do.
Many businesses have ‘service agreements’ that they abide by when dealing with their customers.
As an example, let’s look at the service agreements that some major banks have with their customers.
Personal and Commercial Account Managers are often mandated to respond to their customers within 2 hours of being contacted. This is a service model that some banks have adopted because ‘customer service’ is very important to these organizations. These banks understand that by responding to their customers in a timely manner, they are providing them with great customer service.
As a real estate investor and landlord, you need to adopt a model similar to the bank’s ‘service agreements’.
You may chose not to share your service agreement with your tenant, however, the service agreement is something that you need to understand fully and be committed to.
Here is an example…
A tenant calls you on a Friday morning in the middle of the Summer. They leave you a voicemail message letting you know that the Air Conditioner unit in their house has stopped working, and they have asked that you give them a call back when you can.
It is my firm belief that as a proactive real estate investor and landlord, you should be responding to your tenant the same day in which they have contacted you, no matter what the matter is.
As such in this example above, you should be getting back to them on Friday as well.
The important thing to note is that you may not have any answer for them nor a solution for their problem when you call them back. That does not matter. What does matter is that you are calling them back promptly.
In the example above, you may have no contacts for repair men that you could call to fix or replace the air conditioner. That is okay. As long as you communicate with your tenant and let them know that you are looking after their concern, that is what matters.
Naturally when new landlords do not know how to fix something, or when they don’t know who they can call to come and fix something, they delay responding to their tenant. This should never be done…
So in summary, when your tenant calls you any issue at all, you need to respond to them in a timely manner.
Having a ‘service agreement‘ and responding to your tenant the same day is my advice to you.
If you stay committed to doing this, you will differentiate yourself in your tenant’s mind from all of their past, sub-par landlords.
Happy Investing!
Regards,
Neil Uttamsingh
ps: If you are looking to buy your first rental property, sign up for the First Rental Property Newsletter by entering your email address and name into the top right hand corner of the blog. If you do this, you will receive tips and tricks from experienced real estate investors on how to buy your first rental property!
