Tag Archives: property manager

Administrator

College Students: The Expanding Market for Property Managers

If you live in a city or town predominately inhabited by college students and teens, you may feel as though you have difficulty finding tenants for your rental property. However, this market holds tons of opportunities just waiting to be taken!

In regions with large colleges or universities, there are thousands of students waiting to escape the dorms and live in real apartments and houses; this is where you come in! Targeting your rental property to the college student market can prove to be highly successful if you go about it correctly. It’s normal to feel a bit worried about renting out your property to a group of people who are so young and not fully aware of everything they need to do, but that’s where the lease agreement comes in. Make sure you outline all things that you don’t allow, and enforce a fee if the rules are broken; college students hate additional fees, so it’ll be an extra incentive to be on their best behavior. Also, you can require a guarantor, maybe a parent or guardian, that way you can guarantee you won’t have issues with your tenant.

The college market is also great because college students do not have a lot of requirements or specifications about where they want to live. As long as your property has a bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen, you’re good to go! College students are also good tenants because they can give you a realistic estimate about how long they plan on living in your property because eventually they’ll need to graduate or just relocate in general.

The fall semester for most college students starts in August, so if you do want to expand your market now is the time!

 

Administrator

Springtime is the Best Time

…to fix up your property!

This is the time of the year that we always associate with blooming flowers, green grass, and spring cleaning, making it the perfect time to beautify your property for the coming summer months.

If you’re a homeowner thinking of renting your home for summer, you can take this time to make sure that your home is ready for the upcoming months. If you have a pool, make sure the maintenance is up to date so it looks crystal clear when potential tenants see it. People love flowers! Do a bit of research about what flowers and plants work best in your region and add some foliage to make your home brighter and more inviting to those who are thinking of renting it out.

If you’re a property manager with multiple properties or units, take advantage of the fact that we haven’t entered the rainy season yet and do maintenance on bigger things for your properties. It’s not safe to be toying with electrical power and wiring when there’s a storm going, so use this time to do electrical inspections of your properties and fix what needs to be fixed. Painting the outside of your property definitely can’t be done when it’s rainy out; make it a point to use springtime to your best interest and do any exterior work that you need to do now, before it gets too rainy and hot to enjoy being outside.

Spring is one the best seasons to spend time outside,  don’t let it pass you by!

Administrator

Tenant & Landlord Relationship – It Goes Both Ways

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Here at Tenant File, we constantly emphasize the importance of finding a good tenant, and keeping them. A large part of tenant retention is being a good landlord or property manager.

As  a landlord or property manager, you hold a very important role in your tenants life; you own the place that they call home, and you control the terms that allow them to live there. Obviously it is in your tenants best interest to be the best that they can and make the lease process go smoothly, so you want to make sure that you’re reciprocating this.

Being a good landlord or property manager goes beyond just making sure you do things in a timely manner or charge a fair price for rent (though these are super important), it means treating your tenant with respect and developing a a good understanding with them. Because of the nature of the situation, it isn’t as difficult to be a good landlord to a single home or small property; you’re able to have a more personal experience as a landlord and give more individualized service. If you’re a property manager with a lot of tenants, be sure to get to know them and make them feel that they’re not just lost in the sea of all the tenants. If you can make a lot of tenants happy, you’re bound to keep them and have them referring people to your property.

 

New User Questions

Property Manager Security Alert

Map on computerA higher rate of urgency does not imply ever-present panic, anxiety, or fear. It means a state in which complacency is virtually absent.” – John P. Kotter

It’s getting to where we are reading about new data security breaches nearly every day, but this last one is a ‘doozey’. It is the giant JP Morgan Chase bank, and it involves 76 million customers and 7 million businesses, and that is only what they are admitting right now. This started way back in June, but we are just now hearing about it. Now, they have “closed the known access paths”, according to Chase spokeswoman Patricia Wexler. This comes on the heels of the Target and Home Depot data breaches, as well as a growing list of others.

Property managers are especially vulnerable, especially those that have their data in the ‘cloud’, a hip way of saying your data is on someone else’s computers. That data is most likely spread out on many servers in the US and abroad. You are holding the keys to the Owner’s bank account information as well as your Tenant’s bank account information, with the exception that you gave the keys away to someone that you don’t even know.

What you may ‘not’ know is that there is an entire industry formed around the many security ‘holes’ in the software programs that protect your valuable data. These companies have brilliant programmers that spend every day looking for ways to break into the websites and servers holding your data. But they are not criminals – it is all legal. They find the breaches, contact the companies owning the website, and offer to let them know what they found. Nice, huh? Not so fast. A single bug or vulnerability can fetch thousands of dollars if it is small and 10’s of thousands (or more) if it is major. Or, how would you like a ‘protection’ subscription for only $200,000.00 per year? If the vulnerable company can’t pay the price, no problem, the ‘breach finders’ can just move on to the next client that ‘will’ pay for the information.

And who is that client? Well, the second one in line is our good old government, such as the NSA. They actually have a budget for this, rumored to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. They want to keep Internet vulnerabilities for themselves to track the ‘bad guys’, and an example of that was the ‘Heartbleed’ bug, which our government kept silent on for a year and a half while they exploited it.

If it can’t be sold to the government, next in line are competitors or others that want to exploit the security ‘holes’ in a website. Here is where it gets seedy. Of course the ‘breach finders’ say they don’t sell information to ‘bad guys’, such as countries on the ‘terrorist’ list, but they do often sell to foreign countries that don’t have the best interest of the USA’s citizens in mind.

This could be ‘your’ information that is being bought and sold. Should you panic? No, but should you keep everything you have in the ‘cloud’? I think not. Complacency is not your friend.