26 Dec What Does A Property Manager Do?

Typical Syracuse Rental

Seasoned and Experienced real estate investors understand the value that a good property manager can bring to the table. Renpro is a property management company that operates in the Syracuse, NY market and we have multiple clients who are seasoned investors themselves and some of these experienced clients even manage properties that are closer to their own homebase. When you’re vetting a property management company you really want to make sure that the owners or people within the property are investors themselves, there is no substitute for experience and to be able to run a property in tip top shape, you’ve had to have made a lot of mistakes. Hire a property management company that has already made those mistakes and do not hire one that is going to make those mistakes for the first time on your property.

There are investors that are entering into the real estate investing industry who are new, they may not understand the housing laws, especially in NYS. Property management is a deceptively difficult thing to accomplish properly. From the outside looking in, it may appear that all a property manager brings to the table is listing a property for rent, collecting the rents, and then sending them your way. You absolutely have “managers” who tend to charge rock bottom rates and can cause havoc due to their inexperience.

The Cost

Renpro charges a flat fee of 10% of the COLLECTED rents. This means if we do not collect rent from one of your tenants for that month, we’re not charging you. For an apartment that costs $1,200/month ($14,400/yr), our cost is $1,440/yr. There are managers that sometimes charge less and perhaps you have tried to reach these managers before you found our page and it’s likely that you weren’t even able to get them on the phone. Picking the correct property manager is incredibly important, if you happen to choose a bargain manager and they leave your property vacant for 1 month, or they place a bad tenant, now you’re going to be paying for an eviction, additional damages are likely, trash out fees, debris removal, etc. A non-paying tenant can cost 2-3 months worth of rent, another month of rent for the turn over, plus eviction fees.

The Responsibilities

Here is a list of what we offer our property management clients in the Syracuse Market.

Property Marketing w/ Photos – When a property is going through a turnover and a tenant has provided us with notice that they are moving / non renewing their lease, we schedule a final walk through to ensure a quick return of the tenants security deposit. During this inspection, if the property is in the same condition that it was provided to the tenant in initially, we will collect a new set of property photos. These photos will accompany the marketable listing of the property for rent. We list all properties for rent on numerous websites and the NYS MLS (Multiple Listing Service used by Realtors).

NYS Tenant / Landlord Laws and Regulation Upkeep – NYS has one of the toughest landlord / tenant laws and eviction law setups. This can be a major turn off for out of state investors and even local investors. We have seen many property owners arrested for wrongful eviction during the COVID-19 eviction moratorium. Not only do we keep up with these laws stringently, we have an in-house attorney who makes sure we do not make a mistake in any step of the process.

Your Local Agent – Many Cities, Villages, and Towns have a requirement that you have a local agent represent you and your property. For example, Auburn, NY has an amazing set of properties available with huge value add potential, but you don’t see a big influx of investors. This is because Auburn prohibits anyone from owning a rental property in Auburn NY if you do not have a local agent within 30 minutes of the City. Some of our personal best performing properties are in Auburn. The rental rates are excellent and the initial costs are low.

Tenant Screening – Properly screening a tenant is perhaps the most important portion of being a property manager. There is a strict set of procedures that all of our managers must follow, and you must have good intuition. There are things that we pick up on that will result in an INSTANT denial of application. For example, we receive a lot of rental applications or messages from people and right away we are presented with the applicant talking to us about their emotional support animal. The ADA does not recognize any protections for emotional support animals, and I use this as an example because it is one of the most abused excuses for Tenants to bully their way into getting a pet into a rental where pets are not allowed. We view this as deception and therefore we either won’t respond to the applicant or simply deny their application. We are absolutely okay with those who have real disabilities and real service animals, we are not okay with those who abuse it and lie for their personal gain.

Maintenance Requests & Major Repairs – Our company employees many in-house maintenance staff. Renpro is not just a management company, we own quite a bit of real estate in the Syracuse are and we are under constant new acquisitions. We constantly have new remodels going and with the size of our portfolio we are able to keep a large staff of just maintenance crew and remodelers on full time, and for the jobs that we can’t handle; we have a great list of well vetted, responsive, and affordable sub-contractors. Our construction company is one of the highest rated, full-service construction companies in Syracuse as well.

Collect Rents & Deposits / Disbursement of Rents – Just like with everything else we do; we are very strict with how rents are collected. We work with many different agencies and charities, some tenants have partial rents paid by different agencies, section 8, Christopher community, DSS, etc and handling all of these misc payments and keeping track can be a daunting task when your portfolio grows. We work diligently with all of our Tenants to make sure they are paying via automatic direct deposit each month. All Tenant receipts are emailed automatically when they pay and we provide our Tenants and Management Clients with access to a detailed lease payment ledger. At the end of the year, through our content management system, our Clients are able to print out a detailed profit & loss for their property that automatically includes everything you need to file your taxes.

Evictions & Notices – We work with different attorneys for different things, but our eviction attorney is an absolute pitbull. We start serving all required notices after the rent is 3 days late. We do not want to waste a single day in the eviction process. Although we feel that our Tenant / Landlord relationships are strong, we do not give an inch. Our loyalty is to our Client and the Client’s bank account. When other attorneys have failed during the COVID-19 eviction moratorium, our attorneys were able to secure numerous evictions in Onondaga, Cayuga, and Oswego counties.

QUESTIONS? WANT TO HIRE RENPRO? CONTACT US BELOW.