Property Managers - Why do they always Overpromise and Underdeliver?

[Mat Lewczenko]

I hear this ALOT...
"I had a great PM company, paid them $X but they are gone, had to fire them. They were great in the beginning and then..."

What makes them great at the beginning?
What are the biggest let downs?

I ask because my partner and I are putting together a business plan to start managing other investor's properties as well.

What do you all think is the best Value Proposition that we could offer that the current management pool is lacking in.

Very interested to hear everyone's perspective.

[Bryan Hancock]

I can't really think of specifics Mat. Over charging for services or being lazy when finding cheap solutions is a constant problem. I have also found that many managers want to bury their head in the sand instead of deal with late pays or evictions too.

Some of the smaller companies constantly have turnover or "upgrade" their system causing trouble with money hitting our bank on time. They also want to sign new management contracts midway through a tenant's tenure because some new crisis came up they didn't expect. Recently it was owners being foreclosed on, which necessitated kicking out tenants.

Another major problem is cash flow. Managers collect rents at the beginning of the month and take forever to send the money to me because of how their system works. That would be something I would stress if you are trying to differentiate yourself. Owners with many properties will really appreciate not having tens of properties where they have to shell out the mortgage prior to collecting rents.

Some simple statements each month are very helpful too. I don't want to read through 15 journal entries to see what happened for the month and I certainly don't want to trace balances across months. Give me something simple to understand with a common sense breakdown of how the property is performing.

For larger properties this seems to be less of a problem, but a lot of the problems described above are very common for smaller property managers...from an owner's standpoint.

I am sure I can think of other things...I'll try to post about them as I can think of them.