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

Your manager is your most important asset. They are critical to the success of your self-storage facility. You want a highly trained, exceptional, 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 on how things are going. 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 them. Make sure that you list your requirements. 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.

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 multi-task and is dependable.

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?

How well do 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 property. 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. As always, happy investing.