How to Manage Rental Properties from the Road

Property management is an underrated part of the real estate industry. Some property managers even go as far as to operate rental properties in multiple states and locations. Traveling property managers are not popular but they exist to make the lives of investors much easier.

If you are a property owner who’s constantly on the road, you might have issues with trusting the tenants completely, collecting rent, etc. Some property managers often have to travel for a variety of causes. Most of the time, it’s due to monthly check-ups on properties and meetings with tenants or investors. 

To comprehend how you can manage rental properties if you are constantly on the road, first you have to understand what responsibilities you have as a property manager or owner. You also must understand what managing rental properties means. 

Property Management Responsibilities

New property managers need to understand that the main goal is creating convenience for property investors and taking the workload off of their hands. To accomplish this, you need to focus on completing multiple tasks successfully. 

The core of every business is the satisfaction of customers. Your customer is the property owner, and the property owner’s clients are tenants, therefore, as a property manager you are working on two levels. You need to complete the tasks given by landlords while simultaneously meeting the tenants’ needs. 

Marketing & Setting Prices

To effectively manage rental properties, you must be able to market them and determine rent prices. Before taking care of contracts and attending to tenant complaints, you need to find tenants. To do so, you need to market the properties and set accurate and logical prices. Your goal with this task is to find tenants quickly and make as much profit as possible. However, you can only make a profit if the property is well-maintained and desirable.

Finding Good Tenants

A good tenant is not easy to find. You need to conduct interviews and negotiations before finding the right tenant who is willing to pay the rent and do it on time.

There are many factors to consider, especially if you are going to be on the road at all times. How trustworthy is the person you are allowing to enter the property? Will they be too loud, negligent, or fail to pay the rent on time?

Firstly, you need to go through the applications and make sure that the given information is true. Secondly, you need to ask the right questions. Do their jobs allow them to afford to pay the rent on time? Are they stable? Do they have criminal records, party often, or have pets?

In the end, you can’t be completely sure that the tenant you found is completely honest, but a somewhat trustworthy applicant is good enough if you can check up on them often. 

Maintenance

To manage rental properties, you need to manage maintenance and find good contractors that fit in your budget. When a property is damaged, it’s the owner’s responsibility to fix it. Therefore, you need to be careful with maintenance problems and fix them properly, so you don’t have to go back to the same issues frequently.

Collecting Rent

Property management can only be completed when you gain income. The way for you to do that is to collect rent on time from all of your tenants. You can collect rent by transfer or cash. Either way, you need to set reminders and manage a list of your tenants.

Evictions

This is the unpleasant part of property management, however, it’s often necessary. You might realize at some point that your tenants are not very honest and careful people. They might be too loud, negligent, or fail to pay the rent quite frequently. Unforutnatly, if you want to manage rental properties, you may have to eventually deal with an eviction.

Property Management from the Road

What can you do if you can’t always be at the spot to care for your property? Even if you are a good property manager, you might be on the road taking care of different rentals at different times. When there are emergencies or tasks to be handled, you need to be alert and you need to make quick decisions and take action.

Either way, there might come a time when just communicating with your tenants and giving them warnings doesn’t work anymore. It is your right as a property owner or a manager to evict irresponsible tenants. 

Hire a Property Management Company

If you are not already familiar with the process to manage rental properties, a property manager hired to help an owner, the course you can take is hiring professionals in your local area. If your job requires you to be on the road at all times, if you have frequent work trips, or if you simply want to travel while also having a passive income, you need to put the responsibility of managing rentals into another person’s hands. 

You can hire a property management company that operates around your rental property. You can trust professionals to operate your business. Mostly, property management companies already have partnerships with contractors, marketing teams, and a foolproof system of rent collection. 

You can rely on the right property management company to do the job you are too busy to do. There are multiple ways that you can contact your assigned property manager from a distance. Therefore, if you hire professionals, you will have fewer worries. 

Online Software

There are variations of software that enables you to manage rental properties easily. This software allows property owners to communicate with tenants. Moreover, these applications will help you sign leases and agreements virtually. The pandemic showed us that you can work remotely on any business using functional online sites. 

The technology is advanced enough for you to communicate with people all around the world, make transactions, take care of maintenance, sign leases, etc. 

Rent Payments

You can make online transactions and set reminders when your tenants need to pay rent. You can collect rent worldwide by using online banks, or transaction portals, such as PayPal and Wise.

Tenant Portal

You can use software to create the tenant portal. If you have multiple tenants in different locations, managing rentals might get quite confusing. However, an online portal will help you in multiple ways. You can sort out documents, and receive maintenance notifications.

Online Maintenance

Tenants can post online complaints with pictures and detailed information on maintenance issues. Using online maintenance tools, you can contact contractors and give them directions. To make sure that tasks are completed, you can keep in touch with your tenants about the issue. 

Tenant Communication

Your tenants will feel the need to contact you from time to time. You can set up online meetings in a variety of ways. There are multiple platforms that allow us to communicate online. The pandemic made Zoom calls quite popular, you can use Google Meets, Skype, or simply FaceTime. Using the internet, you can talk to anyone at any time from any point in the world.

How to Manage Rental Properties from the Road – Summary

Property management is not a very easy job, especially if you do it from the road, however, with the right system, anything becomes simple. There are many traveling property managers who handle their jobs perfectly. You can manage properties, collect rent, communicate with tenants, etc. from the road as well as from home.

There are multiple tasks that you need to complete while operating rental real estate. Doing so while traveling from one place to another can become easier if you use online platforms and hire property managers.