How To Provide The Best Renting Experience As A Property Manager With Lydia Winkler
It can be difficult to ensure that your tenants are satisfied as a property managers. But there are many things you can do to provide the best renting experience possible! This video will discuss the importance of offering a great renting experience for your tenants. We cover things like how to set up move-in days, rental agreements, and more!
RentCheck is the property management solution that helps property managers save time on inspections with easy self-guided inspections that anyone can do from their smartphone. Know more here https://www.getrentcheck.com/
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How To Provide The Best Renting Experience As A Property Manager With Lydia Winkler
I am sure you had the statistics about the median net worth of US homeowners versus renters. When you look at something like $255,000 for a homeowner, the stats are $6,000 or $6,300 actually. Having your security deposit docked and taken away from you can be a major deal.
It is completely like you are robbing someone of their freedom to move. I also think the landlords and property managers have, depending state by state, whether it is two weeks to give the security deposit back or a month with an itemized list of deductions. If you have everything you need that day the resident moves out, give it back to them that day. That is what we are trying to do. You should be able to get your security deposit back the day you move out.
You should be able to. When we talk about the opportunities PropTech has to offer, it is of the most fundamentally broken processes and disproportionately impacts. Frankly, the owners of real estate tend to be very wealthy. This is just the way society works. It is the tenants who are marginalized and the median net worth. A tire chunk of your net worth is tied up in a security deposit and not getting it back can be destructive. Also, the power landlords have if you do not pay your rent, your credit gets hurt in a bad way. If your credit is hurt, you cannot pay your rent. If you cannot get your security deposit or a part of it back, what are you supposed to do?
We have a serious issue with homelessness. These are real issues. It is good to see some types of solutions coming out in the market. What do you see state by state? Do you see any major trends or is this problem really a problem that is more or less the same problem throughout the US or does it vary state by state tremendously?
It is the same problem. We have everything from variant class A properties to Section 8 housing to condominiums in San Francisco to rural homes in South Dakota, all using RentCheck. The common denominator is that inspections are essential to property management but they continue to be an ongoing hassle because property managers want to scale their business.
With every other industry, there is a labor shortage and they do not have the capacity to have boots on the ground to do these regular routine inspections, which is why PropTech, has become the behemoth that it is and why residents are the future. Involving the resident in resident empowerment is the future of property management.
What do you see when it comes to the types of claims that are made against tenants? Are there certain pieces of the home, furniture, and fixed assets that are constantly in dispute? Where the damage tends to occur?
Inspections are essential to property management, but they continue to be an ongoing hassle.
It is typically around cleanliness and the most used areas which are kitchens and bathrooms. That is where tenants are getting docked. Not cleaning out the refrigerator is a big one, drains, etc.
Plumbing issues like drains clogging up.
Regular maintenance and how do you mitigate that? You lay out what the expectations are. How do you do that? By regularly getting visibility on your units. That is all about education. You cannot expect a renter to be perfect off the gate but you can certainly educate them on what the expectations are.
I am sure there are many cases where having pets are certainly a big hit on the security deposit because pets can cause a lot of damage. Is that a trend that you are seeing?
People ask all the time, “What if your resident gets a pet? How do I know that they are not having a pet legally?” It is the same thing. You could tell them you are going to inspect the unit tomorrow and they happen to leave their pet with their friend while you inspect the unit. It is the same thing. I do not think that is going away.
I am referring to the fact that having a pet is more likely to cause more wear and tear, which as a result is going to mean more damage done to the units. Having a pet legally, not illegally.
It also depends on the pet. You could say the same thing about a toddler.
You do not charge toddler fees. You cannot discriminate and say, “You cannot have toddlers,” but you can charge pet fees and you can have rules around whether you are allowed pets or not.
This is an issue but we have also seen, especially depending on the type of unit that pet-friendly places are booming. There are pets in condo buildings and multifamily areas, pet designated areas, and pet washing stations, all of this we have seen a trend. Even with RentCheck’s product offering, we are not just doing unit inspections.
Now we have home building out multifamily area inspections, so property managers can get really proper documentation, making sure the elevators have been cleaned, the mail room is organized or the bike storage room is orderly. As a way to really organize all of their buildings and properties and have a checklist for managing, for managing what they look like, who is doing what, and who is getting what. Especially in COVID, that has been a big concern for our customers.
COVID, especially, there were already a lot of concerns about apartment affordability, moving costs, rents arising, and stagnant wages. Many renters are left in the worst of situations. Interesting stats, 78% of US workers are living paycheck to paycheck. That is a shocking fact. Sixty percent of Americans apparently have less than $1,000 in savings. COVID is just compounding problems. It is a sad, fate that we are in. We have got a lot of owners, landlords, and investors reading this.
What advice do you have, of course, to use your product RentCheck but how can they rethink their security deposit process and then move in and move out inspections? Some people have owner-operated properties, so those guys are really interested. In other cases, it is something you just outsource to a property manager, so speak to owners as well who have property managers. Is there something that they can do and push their property managers to do?
Regular property inspections help build the relationship between residents and their property managers.
First, in general, by having a more transparent process, you are going to avoid disputes with your residents. If you are providing and doing a thorough move and inspection and share that with the resident, they then know this is what it must look like when they move out if they want their deposit back. Also, for owner-operators, a picture is worth a thousand words.
Owning a property is a major asset and if you are regularly getting inspections from your property management company, you feel better about your investment. You feel better about knowing your asset is being well taken care of. Why wouldn’t do that? It really doesn’t cost you much to have the resident do this. It also helps build the relationship between residents and their property managers. There is less tension because everyone is on the same page about what the unit looks like when something is getting fixed, etc.
Do you see any correlation between the type of asset? Is it more damage done in lower-income or affordable housing Section 8 versus Class A? Any trends you see there?
No, there are messy people who exist in all economic brackets. People get creative when it comes to getting their residents to do inspections. We handle all of the reminders and education about the inspection. That is our bread and butter. It is involving the resident and explaining to them why this is important and text message reminders, email reminders, you name it. We have also seen property managers if whoever completes the inspection on time is entered to win a gift card or you get $20 off your rent or we have some with affordable housing.
Before the government comes in and does their annual inspection, they have their renters do a rent check inspection. This way, they get ahead of damage before and there are no surprises. They pay their residents to do that, which is great. There are a lot of things. There are also other companies that are all about rewarding renters for doing things. That is going to only increase and another trend in PropTech as well.
We are investors in a startup called Stake, which gives cash back to renters as they pay their rent back on time. Tenants love it. They are part of the process. There is a reward and there is an alignment of interests, which tends to not happen often, and property, which is a shame. Property managers have a lot of power in these situations.
The assumption is that the larger the property management firm, the more processes they have, and the more organized they are. Is that true? Do you see that maybe smaller property managers tend to because they are trying to cut costs and they operate more in a lean way? Perhaps they don’t have procedures and policies in place and there is inconsistency and there is pretty poor move-in, move out in inspection processes. Do you see that trend? That is the intuitive assumption.
I see that trend with big property management companies as well, no matter the size or they are just not efficient. A lot of people are approaching RentCheck because they want to scale their business. They are growing, depending on the size, whether it is 10 to 100 doors each month. They want to scale and they cannot do that if they are still having someone walk the unit with a resident and fill out a paper checklist and then goes nowhere. No one can access it. No one remembers where it was or they are giving a resident a paper checklist to fill out and return and then they never get it back. You get into this, “He said, she said, they said,” argument at the end of the lease. it is a mess.
In general, property management companies, whether you have 10 units or 20,000 want a system that you trust on both sides. You want your renters to trust it and you want your team to trust the system in which you are operating. Historically, that has not been the case. Back to residents and how property managers have all this power. The other thing is when you think about the experience as a renter, renters spend a majority of their income on rent.
This is what they are spending the most money on. Renting a home is the most intimate consumer experience. Consumers are also used to documenting and reviewing all these other things in their life. After they take a Lyft, they rate their driver. After they stay in an Airbnb, they rate their hosts, and renting a home is no different but it is the most intimate consumer experience.
It is where you spend the most time. It is where you feel safe. It is where you fall in love. It is where you see your children. It is the most expensive and personal consumer experience of all time. If you can involve the renter in the process or educate them to be better renters to treat the property better, property managers are going to love that. They already do. They want happy customers, which is the resident. They want their renters to leave good reviews. They want their residents to stick around at least the good ones.
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About Zain Jaffer
Zain Jaffer is an accomplished executive, investor, and entrepreneur. He started his first company at the age of 14 and later moved to the US as an immigrant to found Vungle, after securing $25M from tech giants including Google & AOL in 2011. Vungle recently sold for $780m.
His achievements have garnered international recognition and acclaim; he is the recipient of prestigious awards such as "Forbes 30 Under 30", "Inc. Magazine's 35 Under 35," and the "SF Business Times Tech & Innovation Award." He is regularly featured in major business & tech publications such as The Wall Street Journal, VentureBeat, and TechCrunch.
Important Links
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