The Fifth Rule of Thumb – Managing Your Property – Finding a Manager!

When you are evaluating your self-storage facility, you really must evaluate your manager. Your manager is the key to your success. You want a highly trained, experienced, property manager. You need someone who can find great tenants, keep the property running at a high level of performance and someone who communicates clearly with you. You want someone who can handle your social media presence and your eviction notices. So how do you find someone who can do all of this and more.

The first thing that you need to do is make a good job description. Let potential candidates know that you want someone with experience and that you are not willing to train a brand new, fresh out of high school, applicant. Make a list of responsibilities and duties that will be required of your manager. You need someone who is experienced, educated, and has the necessary skills to run the property. This way many of the candidates will weed themselves out. You will still get random resumes thrown at you, but this should help. You need someone who is able to step in seamlessly and turn your property from coal into a diamond.

When you are getting ready to interview your candidates, think of all the traits that are important to you. What do you want in a property manager? Obviously, you need someone who is organized. You want someone that will be able to quickly grasp your software system so that they can successfully manage the property. You need someone with great computer skills. You can train anyone to use software but not if they don’t know how to find the on button. You want someone who can handle multiple roles and is dependable. You need someone who is willing to stand up to bad tenants and get the rents or get them evicted. You need someone who can sell your property to potential clients and follow your step by step instructions each time they rent the property.

When you are interviewing your candidate, set up a scenario and see how they would handle it. Can they handle ringing phones, an angry tenant at the counter, while trying to sign up a new applicant? Can they keep that new applicant there in spite of all that? Do they have good sales skills so that they can upsell potential renters into better, more expensive, units? Can they keep a tenant from moving into a less expensive self-storage facility?

How well did you communicate with the applicant? If you can’t communicate with them, how will you give them instructions on how to run your self-storage facility? You want someone that you can easily give instructions too, but also someone who can easily communicate to you what is happening with your self-storage facility. You want someone who has initiative, but you also want to make sure that they stay within your boundaries. Is this someone who will help make your self-storage facility better?

There are great candidates out there. Make sure that you take the time to find someone that you mesh well with and someone who will be an asset to your self-storage facility. Don’t waste time on someone who isn’t trained and doesn’t have experience. You need a great team if you want to have a great property. As always, happy investing.