I own a triplex in Cleveland, and it's my first investment property. We closed mid-January. I posted before about our terrible property management company. That was in March. In May, it was acquired by another well-known (at least in that area) real estate company that has a property management division. We went into the new company with two units rented and one unit vacant.
It's been a hassle since the beginning, but the last 6-8 weeks have really taken the cake. We have an agent, who I'll call Kate, and her manager, who I'll call Mary.
We have been waiting on several estimates for services (a washer/dryer hookup and also lead mitigation... we failed the required lead test) since the end of July. We also still have no tenant in that vacant unit; Kate claims she's showing it all the time and that people love it, like the location, like the size, like the price, but they just don't put in an application. I've asked her several times if we should reduce the price, and each time, she says no, let's not.
Kate does not return calls/texts/emails UNLESS we call Mary to complain. Then Mary, who won't return phone calls herself, apparently tells Kate to contact us and we get halfway answers. The answers since the end of July have been a lot of "I don't know why we don't have an estimate yet. I called the lead company and didn't hear back. I can call them again. Idk why we aren't getting applications. The contractors must all be busy. I don't know, I don't know, I don't know." So maybe we'll text her on a Monday, call on a Tuesday, email on a Wednesday, wait til the following Tuesday to complain to Mary, then Kate will miraculously email with her "IDKs" on Wednesday. This has been a pattern for about two months now.
In the meantime, they're having no problem getting people out there to make random fixes to things like "a door broke (and costs $110 to repair)" and "a male adaptor had to be replaced (for $280)." (A male adaptor for what? "I don't know.") We've repaired more doors in this house in 8 months than we've repaired in our 15 years of owning our own home.
We asked Mary for itemized invoices... mainly because we've already had some charges that were duplicate, triplicate, or not even belonging to our property!! Have we received these invoices? No, we have not.
We have gotten about $500 in payouts since May. The rent for the two apartments that are filled is $1,645 in total.
Are we just way out of our minds on expectations, or did we seriously just get a complete lemon of a property manager in less than 8 months? My husband is extremely hesitant to go to a different company because now he thinks they're all like this. We aren't sure if we're up for self-managing, mainly because we haven't done it before. For the amount of follow-up this requires, though, I can't imagine it would be more work than it currently is, dealing with an incompetent PM company. If this is par for the course, maybe it's best to just sell it and call it an expensive lesson learned....
