All Forum Posts by: Jonathan Mason

Mice. Lots of mice. Found a rotted sill plate on my foundation in September and that was a mouse super highway. 

@Michael Baum Those are really great suggestions. I had totally forgotten about Care.com what a great idea. 

@Dave Stokley yes, that sounds like exactly what I'm looking for, just have to find someone now. 

@Ken Boone - That makes a lot of sense and I know I'd feel the same way as you, so hopefully others do too. Thanks!

@Ken Boone thanks for the response and suggestions. I thought about reaching out to other rental owners in the neighborhood and surrounding area, there's multiple. I was a little hesitant though considering the fact that I am now competition to them, no? Have you done this and yielded decent referrals before? A little fearful they'll send me someone that they fired for poor performance lol. 

Otherwise, I have thought about reaching out to local agents, previous owners operated (poorly) as a rental the last 18 months they owned it. My thought was to reach out to the selling agent from when I purchased and see if she had any recommendations. 

Also good thought on being the person they call. I'm guessing having one (or maybe a couple) local handymen for maintenance on call is the better strategy vs a caretaker. 

So after getting hooked on BiggerPockets in Summer of 2019, I finally made a purchase in November 2019 on a cottage 4 hours North of me in Michigan (Petoskey/Harbor Springs area). Purchased a fully furnished Ski Chalet with plans to fix it up a little bit because it is a little older and was filthy inside and then get it up and rented. Then of course COVID had different plans for me, lockdown's, in state travel bans, no AirBnb's allowed, etc. so my wife and I stayed there and used it when we were finally allowed to drive up there again last year to finally fix it up a little bit. 

I have rented it just a little bit through word of mouth, but I've been driving there to do the cleaning and laundry every time which has worked fine with only a few rentals so far. However, I've finally listed the property on AirBnb and I'm ready to rent it full time, but I'm not sure who to use to turn the property. I want to self manage the listing itself and just have someone/company clean it, but also not sure if I should have a boots on the ground "Caretaker/Manager" to have guests call if there's issues.

My problem is this, I've search quite a bit and all the property managers in the area want to do the full listing management and charge a huge percentage of gross rent, the cleaning companies I've found are limited to cleaning only or may do laundry for extra but then they refuse to do something silly like dishes if a guest doesn't do them before checking out. 

What's the best way to find someone when you aren't fully local to the area and google isn't helping much?