Property Management Mistakes

[Ken Miller]

Hello, I am wondering how many of you have caught mistakes made by your property management company and what you did to remedy them and keep them from happening again. With my current property management company, I have found two times where they where going to pay me less then what they should have on my monthly cash flow amount and they have made other mistakes too. I am wondering if this is normal and you should just always be checking your statements regularly anyway or if I should start looking for a replacement property management company. Please let me know if there is more info I can provide to help answer this too. This is my first experience with a property management company. 

[Nathan Gesner]

I'm a Property Manager and business owner.  I have six people handling 350 rentals for 150 owners, dozens of vendors, and over 600 tenants. We get hundreds of emails, calls, and walk-ins every day.  It would be impossible to not make mistakes.

the question is, what is an acceptable response and number of mistakes?

i had an owner contact me two weeks ago with a complaint about his owner statement. He found an apparent error on his owner statement, so he went through every statement for the past year and listed a dozen more perceived errors. It took me half a day to review every complaint, but I did it to determine if I was failing to fulfill my duties. I discovered his initial complaint was wrong, as were 10 other complaints. However, two of them were correct and I immediately apologized, compensated him (a total of $160), and explained how I intended to prevent those mistakes from happening again. I also politely recommended he review his statements every month to hold me accountable rather than waiting a year and forcing me to spend half a day researching historical data.

If your PM makes it right and makes an effort to correct the bad behavior, they are probably worth keeping.