Long distance owner: How to have prop man do major repair right?

[Michael Zagorsky]

Looking for advice:

We have a rental house in Alabama.  Wife used to own it as her primary residence before we moved away and turned it into a rental.  We use a rental management company in Birmingham to manage our property.

Long story short.  We have an issue with water around the front door.  It has caused major rot and we already had to replace joists under the flooring a few years ago and the issue is reoccurring.  We inspected the home in July and the tenant showed us the hole in the floor by the front door. Bottom line, we have a water intrusion issue that is causing some major wood damage to the front of the house.  

We've spent about $1k with our existing property management company on repairs in the past few months, but their in-house repair team did not address the issue.

Right now we have a trust issue.  We want the root cause of the problem addressed and the problem fixed for good but we are not sure our property management company can manage this repair and/or stick us with unnecessary costs and/or no guarantee of reoccurence.  

Do you think a property management company can handle this sort of stuff?  Or do we need to fly up there and get a hotel and have to supervise this in person as far as interviewing contractors, etc.?