The Most Frequently Encountered Challenges of Property Management
Property management in Fort Lauderdale offers all kinds of perks—but that doesn’t mean it isn’t without its challenges.
As you likely already know, emergency work orders come through in the middle of the night, rent payments are sometimes late, and it feels like it’s harder than ever to find the right team to protect your investment and ensure your tenants stay happy.
Here’s what you need to know about the most frequent challenges that come with property management here in the Fort Lauderdale area—and how you might overcome them.
Finding Property Managers
Many professionals who own or manage properties find that one of the most challenging tasks is filling open on-site positions—especially for management roles. Staffing and recruitment are proving to be a top issue in property management in this competitive labor market, which has only been amplified by the pandemic. In some cases, the staffing challenges are forcing property owners to raise wages and improve benefits to attract and keep talent, which is not always offset by increased revenue.
Conducting Background Checks
Background checks are designed to help provide a sense of confidence in renters, but they often contribute to higher costs, take lots of time, and can provide outdated or misleading information. Additionally, background checks don’t always provide relevant information about a tenant’s rental payment history. As a result, some potential tenants are denied rental housing without merit, while property owners and managers face longer vacancies and more work to find qualified tenants. Additionally, background checks don’t always provide relevant information about a tenant’s rental payment history.
Managing Single-Family Homes
Managing a single-family home compared to a multi-tenant property comes with its own challenges. While tenants tend to stay longer which equals less turnover, this can also mean that it’s hard to check in about wear and tear over time. Other challenges include factors like:
- Maintaining the yard at each single-family rental property
- Screening applicants and finding the right tenants who will pay on time, take care of the property, and plan to stay for a longer period
- Updating, maintaining, and refreshing a property between tenants
Completing Maintenance Work Orders
Whether you manage single-family properties or large, multi-unit buildings, issues are going to arise—and your tenants will expect you to address them quickly. Having experts on hand to complete work orders promptly can make all the difference. Regularly scheduled preventative and ongoing maintenance can limit pressing emergencies and extend the service life of appliances and amenities. Property turnover is also a great time to perform inspections and maintenance. Having a list of trusted professionals to service, clean, and repair the different aspects of your properties and a way to track maintenance can make this simple and easy.
Performing Property Inspection
Property maintenance is one of the biggest responsibilities of managing rental properties. Even with the most careful tenants, there’s bound to be some natural wear and tear. However, not every tenant may be quite so meticulous. Left unchecked for too long, you may discover a disastrous situation.
To help prevent major damage, you should perform routine property inspections to ensure renters are being good stewards of the property. But this takes time and resources—and with many property owners and managers feeling the pinch of being short-staffed, this is only one more thing on your to-do list. You need support for essential tasks to protect your ultimate investment: Your property.
Ensuring Timely Rent Collection
The basis for everything? Getting paid. Even so, rent collection can be difficult. You need a clear process for collecting rent that’s easy for tenants and also very transparent about penalties for late payments. Automated payment collection can be one valuable tool to take the guesswork or inconsistency out of knowing when funds will appear.
Having the right tools—and the right people behind them—can remove the hassle and difficulty of rent collection at the start of every month.
Simplify Property Management in Fort Lauderdale with Kanga Property Management
Kanga Property Management has over a decade of experience taking on all the challenges that can come with overseeing Fort Lauderdale-area properties. Whether you own one rental property or dozens (or more!), managing rental properties requires significant time, energy, and resources to tackle all the challenges that can pop up from day to day.
Located right in your neighborhood, we’ll be your eyes, ears, and active, involved support system. Kanga Property Management not only has the finger on the pulse of what’s happening in Fort Lauderdale, but we also have the experience to overcome issues that arise and the tools to make property management simpler, less stressful, and more profitable. This includes sophisticated technology solutions and industry expertise to track maintenance, collect rent, find the right tenants, handle legal tasks, address work orders, and more. We’ve got all your property management tasks covered in one place.
Discover more about property management in Fort Lauderdale here, then connect with our team today to learn more.