I could really use a bit of advise here, I'll keep it short and skip the background story.
I bought a condo ~4 years ago and hired a property management company to take care of it. After a few months, I left the country and failed to do a good job of keep tabs on the property management co. I recently got back to town and confronted them with all the problems I have with their management, and I'm trying to decide what to do next. My problems were as follows:
- I asked them (and have the email correspondence to prove it) to do the annual renewal of the home owner's insurance and their representative said they'll do so. They didn't and I had to get a new insurance at more than twice the cost. Thank god nothing happened during the two years.
- I asked them to take care of the HOA payments. My request was done over the phone and I have no written agreement on their behalf. The HOA payments were not made and I got a foreclosure warning for two years of unpaid HOA fees. Is there anything I can do with this? I ended up paying the HOA fees with the additional costs of the collections company - totalled at $6700 (the fees themselves would have been $4000)
A couple of years ago they lease the condo to couple due to the wife's high credit rating. After a few months they couple got divorced and the wife left. From that moment, the husband was late with his payments and knew how to "play the game", he'd consistently pay late. It took them 8 months to finally evict him. After kicking him out, it appears he did more than $1800 worth of damage to the condo and they opened a collections process. My problems with this are as follows:
- Why didn't they get rid of him earlier or inform me of the trouble he was causing. We could have just given him a 30-day notice to terminate the lease and finish at that once we knew he was problematic.
- The fixes required to get the condo in shape were above $200 which is the threshold over which they are required by contract to get my approval and they didn't.
- Some of the repairs done to the condo were performed poorly and cost a lot.
In general, I know I did a bad job of keeping on eye on them but I feel that the way they have been managing my condo was negligent at best. My discussion with the broker ended with him asking what I want to happen. I was planning on demanding the following:
- Properly perform the poor quality repairs for no additional charge
- Be reimbursed for repairs I did not approve and were not critical to get the condo back on the market after the bad tenant
- Be reimbursed for the additional cost of the home owner's insurance
- After the above are sections are completed, terminate the contract and get a different PM
Is this too little to demand? Is this too much? Any advice would be much appreciated...
