Hi, we have been managing our properties for the past 7 years ourselves. We have used agents in the beginning and some are good and some are not so good. One company sent the monthly rental statements and it took me an hour to go through them to confirm the rent had been received in time, they were that confusing.
Another time, a prospective tenant approached us while we were at the house and we referred him to the agent. The agent took over two weeks to begin processing his application – I was not happy.
We call the tenant’s references. Even a doctor, I called her accountant because she was in business and I wanted to check she was ok to pay the rent.
One piece of advice I saw here actually I think is quite good – if you are vetting tenants yourself and they come with a car, check out how the car looks and that’s an indication of how they live.
We also don’t disturb the tenants much. We want them to feel that it’s their home. We repair things promptly and work to maintain a good relationship with everyone. Most of our tenants are pretty long term and we are happy with them.
We find that it suits us to manage the properties ourselves because my husband is handy and wants to generally repair things himself. We did find that the handy people the agencies have on their books to do basic maintenance, will do the work for you at very reasonable rates so that’s a plus.
We have had a difficult tenant we had to deal with directly but we survived it and it was an invaluable learning curve and haven’t gone to an agent since.
We haven’t had a vacancy in our properties as we are really proactive in advertising if a tenant is deciding to leave (we do some room rentals). I find agents don’t have the same sense of urgency as you do.
But that’s just us.
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