Terrible property manager experience

[Thomas Jacobson]

So my wife and I are first time landlords and decided it would be best to hire a property manager to manage our properties. After a lot of research and listening to an audio book it lead me to this website. This was great a resource for rental investments and I could find a property management company in the process. I submitted my information and had 2 companies contact me. After some conversations we ended up with John/ Paulno Property management company. It was great to hear they had previous experience with a larger property management company and home construction. It all sounded it great, but there was little red flags along the way. 

Issue one showing up to take pictures of the property with a cheap point and shoot camera. No color editing or anything done to the photos.

The house was never listed on the MLS.

They didn't listen to the information to list the property. 

Communication was beyond horrible.

Any time an issue arose they just passed it off to use. Then would say the landlord needs to handle that. Yes the furnace went out and we had a company out asap, also had it replaced in less then 4 days. 

The management company never made sure the utility bills were changed in the tenants name. Then it was oh well when it was brought up.

Oh, the 1st day inspection was a simple video walk through. Ok, we thought this was great. Last day was the same thing. Simple walkthrough, but didn't look at anything in the house. We show up later in the day to check the house out and it wasn't cleaned. Now its a he said she said issue so we have to eat that cleaning cost.

Honestly I could go on, but I found a lady took over and is way more qualified to manage properties. One of the properties she took over came with a 110 page move out inspection. Not a stupid video with no comments or anything.

Avoid Lohn/ Paulno Property Management. Learn from our mistakes and we sure did learn a lot from this experience. 

[Drew Sygit]

Hopefully, you learned to read the management contract thoroughly and to make sure it covers all the issues you had!

Over the years we've added more & more paragraphs to our contract, striving to make sure owners are clear on what we can/will do and cannot/won't. 

Unfortunately, now we're getting complaints that our contract is too long and no one wants to read its entirety. 

So, PMC's are, "damned if they do, damned if they don't" :(